Other Wes Moore Quotes

The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.

When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.

I sat back, allowing Wes's words to sink in. Then I responded, "I guess it's hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (quoted from Samuel Buckett)... Failing does not make us a failure. But not trying to do better, to be better, does make us fools.

Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.

Failing doesn't make us a failure. But not trying to do better, to be better, does make us fools.

Do you think that we're products of our environments? I think so, or maybe products of our expectations. Others' expectations of us or our expectations. I mean others' expectations that you take on as your own. I realize how difficult it is to seperate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

I realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

The common bond of humanity and decency that we share is stronger than any conflict, any adversity. Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount. Knowing when to fight and when to seek peace is wisdom. Ubuntu was right.

The common bond of humanity and decency that we share is stronger than any conflict, any adversity, any challenge. Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount. Knowing when to fight and when to seek peace is wisdom.

I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.

Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount.

Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important than not a single moment be wasted.

-After all this pain and heartache, how are you now able to forgive? You seem so at peace with yourself and your life. How are you so able to move on?... -Because Mr. Mandela asked us to.

The written word isn't necessarily a chore but can be a window into new worlds

When it comes time to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were ever here.

I hear you, but it's not the process you should focus on; it's the joy you will feel after you go through the process.

Fighting for your convictions is important. But finding peace is paramount. Knowing when to fight and when to seek peace is wisdom.

Wes didn't think Tony was a hypocrite exactly--he knew why his brother felt obliged to warn him off. But it was clear that Tony didn't have any better ideas or he would've made those moves himself.

...I found myself surrounded by people--starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors--who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within myself. People who taught me that no accident of birth--not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless--would ever define or limit me.

But what all these responses have in common is that they point to the decisive power of information and stories [...]

Wes wanted to be just like Tony. Tony wanted Wes to be nothing like him.

They would work together, fight together, stay together. An unbreakable bond united the crew - for many members it was the only support system they had. It was family.

Later in life I learned that the way many governors projected the numbers of beds they’d need for prison facilities was by examining the reading scores of third graders. Elected officials deduced that a strong percentage of kids reading below their grade level by third grade would be needing a secure place to stay when they got older.

When we're young, it sometimes seems as if our world doesn't exist outside our city, our block, our house, our room. We make decisions based on what we see in that limited world and follow the only models available.

It made me think deeply about the way privilege and preference work in the world, and how many kids who didn't have 'luck' like mine in this instance would find themselves forever outside the ring of power and prestige.

I was taught to remember, but never question. Wes was taught to forget, and never ask why. We learned our lessons well and were showing them off to a tee. We sat there, just a few feet from each other, both silent, pondering an absence.

It's easy to lose control when you were never looking for it in the first place

I guess it's hard to distinguish between second chances and last chances

My Father’s Day Gift will have you remembering those in your life who saw something in you before you saw it in yourself.

It started to become clear to Wes: the drug game was raw capitalism on overdrive with bullets, a pyramid scheme whose base was dead bodies and ruined lives.

When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were ever here.

The expectations that others play on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

A year after completing the Job Corps training, Wes realized the only consistency in his employment was inconsistency. That, and the fact that none of these jobs paid over nine dollars an hour.

when we reach our hands across the globe to serve others, we don’t return empty-handed. There is always an exchange. I learned that from Abdullah. And I would learn it again during my fellowship.

But there was a more recent author and public figure whose work spoke to the core of a new set of issues I was struggling with: the Bronx's own Colin Powell. His book, My American Journey, helped me harmonize my understanding of America's history and my aspiration to serve her in uniform. In his autobiography he talked about going to the Woolworth's in Columbus, Georgia, and being able to shop but not eat there. He talked about how black GIs during World War II had more freedoms when stationed in Germany than back in the country they fought for. But he embraced the progress this nation made and the military's role in helping that change to come about. Colin Powell could have been justifiably angry, but he wasn't. He was thankful. I read and reread one section in particular: The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts more than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all of my heart." -The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (p. 131)

Sophie Bach from The Maker: You’re a human being with a personality and a will, and you make choices and think and create. Is there no meaning to you, Adrien Bach? And what about us? Is the way we feel about each other just simulated emotions from some biological process—nothing more?

Fundamentally, this story is about two boys, each of whom was going through his own personal journey and searching for help. One of them received it; the other didn't. And now the world stands witness to the results. Small interactions and effortless acts of kindness can mean the difference between failure and success, pain and pleasure - or becoming the people we loathe or love to become. We are more powerful than we realize, and I urge you to internalize the meaning of this remarkable story and unleash your own power. (Tavis Smiley)

Early losses condition you to believe that short-term plans are always smarter.

I started to think, maybe we ought to consider this drug problem a public health problem rather than a criminal justice problem. (Mayor Schmoke)

I think the best we can do is give our young people a chance to make the best decisions possible by providing them with the information and the tools and the support they need.

ignored

Boredom in teenage boys is a powerful motivation to create chaos.

no one with bad intentions could case my routine.

In the United States, we see these same faces, and our reflex is to pick up our pace and cross the street. And in this reflexive gesture, the dimensions of our tragedy are laid bare.

Young boys are more likely to believe in themselves if they know that there’s someone, somewhere, who shares that belief. To carry the burden of belief alone is too much for most young shoulders.

With every step on those cracked sidewalks, I passed a new signifier of urban decay. But I didn't even realize it. I was a kid, and just happy to get out of the house. The people I passed would look me up and down, and I would look back, give the traditional head nod, and then go back to practicing my crossover dribble.

In the eternal words of Sir William Ernest Henley: Beyond this place of wrath and tears, Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years, Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

And when I finish my story, the question that comes up the most is the one that initiated the quest: 'What made the difference?' And the truth is that I don't know. People are so wildly different, and it's hard to know when genetics or environment or just bad luck is decisive. As I've puzzled over this issue, I've become convinced that there are some clear and powerful measures that can be taken during this crucial time in a young person's life. Some of the ones that helped me come to mind, from finding strong mentors to being entrusted with responsibilities that forced me to get serious about my behavior.

Wes didn't think Tony was a hypocrite exactly--he knew why his brother felt obliged to warn him off. But it was clear that Tony didn't have any better ideas or he would've made those moves himself.

People who taught me that no accident of birth--not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless--would ever define or limit me. In other words, they helped me to discover what it means to be free...My only wish--and I know Wes feels the same--is that the boys (and girls) who come after us will know this freedom. It's up to us, all of us, to make a way for them.

Freddie Gray and so many other boys like him grew up in the type of poverty that permeates everything: how you are educated, the water you drink, the home you live in, the air you breathe, the school you spend most of your day in, the way you are policed, whether or not you will die in the same poverty you were born in. It was that poverty that raised the probability that Freddie would be exactly where he was on April 12, 2015, and then again on April 27, 2015.

We loved one another, but how long would we mourn the absence of any one of us?

I'm sure in my outlaw fantasies I would've been as defiant as Shea, but something about this situation had soured me on romantic rebellion.

And more than that, they now considered themselves not Jamaicans who were living in America but Americans of Jamaican descent.

It was a risk, and Wes knew it. But taking risks is at the heart of the drug enterprise, and scared money didn't make money.

There was a comfortable distance between my life now and the levels of confusion that had engulfed me just a few years ago. This uniform had become a force field that kept the craziness of the world outside from getting too close to me, but I wondered if it was just an illusion.

But I'd been around enough street cats to know the code: they hit you with a knife, you find a gun. And I didn't have to be a Black Panther to know that n**** was the ultimate fighting word. This was the kind of knowledge we understood, the kind of code that was so deeply fundamental it never had to be fully articulated.

The irony of the situation forced me to smile, featuring my newly cracked tooth. Years earlier, I had run through the same woods with all of my might, looking for safety, trying to get away from campus. Tonight, I ran through the same woods looking for safety, but in the other direction.

Instead, I asked a question: 'Do you think we're all just products of our environments?' His smile dissolved into a smirk, with he left side of his face resting at ease. 'I think so, or maybe products of our expectations.' 'Others' expectations of us or our expectations for ourselves?' 'I mean others' expectations that you take on as your own.' I realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others face on us help us form our expectations of ourselves. 'We will do what others expect of us,' Wes said. 'If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. If they expect us to go to jail, then that's where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.' I sympathized with him, but I recoiled from his ability to shed responsibility seamlessly and drape it at the feet of others. 'True, but it's easy to lose control when you were never looking for it in the first place.

Powell, in his pragmatic way, wanted what I wanted: A fair shot. A place to develop himself. A code that would instill discipline, restrain passion, and order his steps. A way to change the world without first unleashing the whirlwind. In the chaos of the world I grew up in, those were as appealing to me as Malcolm's cry for revolution was to his generation.

The excessively hot and cramped conditions, coupled with the fact that some of the toughest schools in the military take place at Fort Benning, have earned the base the nickname, 'the land that God forgot.' I was hoping that he'd remember us today. The formalities that usually accompanied my prayers-'dear most heavenly father' and ''most gracious and everlasting God' were replaced with very simple, blunt and direct requests like 'Help!' and 'Please don't let me die like this.

Where was God when people didn't make enough money to feed their families? Where was God when when kids were selling rocks at twelve years old, and their parents encouraged it because the kids were the main breadwinners in the home? Where was God when a young boy came home from a school that was as uninterested in him as he was in it? Where was God when a kid had a question and looked to his friends in the streets for an answer because his father was locked up and his mother strung out?

Early losses condition you to believe that short-term plans are always smarter. Now

For the rest of us - those who snuck in despite coming from the margins - the mission has to be to pull up others behind us.

At that moment, I realized I had no idea what poverty was - even in West Baltimore we lived like kings compared with this. An embarrassing sense of pride tentatively bloomed in the middle of the sadness I felt at my surroundings.

Our young men - along with our young women - are our strength and our future. Yet we fear them.

Above all, I hope that this book can provide young people a way to identify with success as a possibility, and a reason to believe that a story that begins with struggle, apathy, and the pain of loss can still have a happy ending.

She wasn't a snob, she was scared.

Those murders were concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were concentrated in a single demographic; young black men. In some neighborhoods, the young men would've been safer living in war zones. We laughed at the panhandler on the block, but he wasn't just an object of ridicule, he was an unsettling omen.

There was no official ceremony that brought my childhood to an end. Instead, crises or other circumstances presented me with adult-sized responsibilities and obligations that I had to meet one way or another. For some boys, this happens later - in their late teens or even twenties - allowing them to grow organically into adulthood. But for some of us, the promotion to adulthood, or at least its challenges, is so jarring, is so sudden, that we enter into it unprepared and might be undone by it.

Hip-hop had begun to play a special role in my life. It wasn't just music and lyrics. It was a validator. In my struggle to reconcile my two worlds, it was an essential asset...But even more than that, I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams - of wealth or power or revolution or success - we all shared. It broadcast an exaggerated version of our complicated interior lives to the world, made us feel less alone in the madness of the era, less marginal.

My desperation for her support was in constant tension with my desperation for independence and freedom.

The truth is that our individual efforts are important but insufficient. Our collective action -- the leaders we elect, the institutions administered in the name of the People, the other stanchions at the table --- offers an opportunity for bigger, longer-lasting action.

There's a term in the hood for a face like Tony's that cold, frozen, stare. The ice grille. It's a great phrase. A look of blank hostility that masks two intense feelings - the fire evoked by the grille (which is also slang for face). and the cold of the ice. But the tough façade is just a way to hide a deeper pain or depression that kids don't know how to deal with. A bottomless chasm of insecurity and self-doubt that gnaws at them. Young boys are more likely to believe in themselves if they know that there's someone, somewhere, who shares that belief. To carry the burden of belief alone is too much for most young shoulders. Tony had been overwhelmed by that load years ago. Now he wanted to help Wes manage his. Like a soldier after years of combat, Tony hated the war and wanted Wes to do whatever he could to avoid it. He was willing to risk seeming like a hypocrite.

Blood trickled from his mouth. He quickly walked off to get some water and clean his face. No foul was called. I would soon learn that calling fouls just wasn't done.

My mother hoped her gift would prevent other families from having to go through what we suffered. But her act of kindness could do nothing to ease our feelings of loss.

When my mother grew up in the Bronx, despite rising poverty levels, the sense of family and community were strong.

We were all enclosed by the same fence, bumping into one another, fighting, celebrating. Showing one another our best and worst, revealing ourselves - even our cruelty and crimes - as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood.

realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious.

Second chances are pretty fleeting. What do you mean? From everything you told me both us did some pretty wrong stuff when we were younger, and both of us had second chances. But if the situation or the context where you make the decisions don’t change, the second chances don’t mean too much, huh? Wes and I stared at each other for a moment surrounded by the evidence that some kids were forced to become adults prematurely. These incarcerated men, before they’d even reached a point of basic maturity had flagrantly and tragically squandered the few opportunities they had to contribute productivity to something greater than themselves. I sat back allowing Wes’s words to sink in. Then I responded: I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.

This is the story of two boys living in Baltimore with similar histories and an identical name: Wes Moore. One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.

Later in life I learned that the way many governors projected the numbers of beds they’d need for prison facilities was by examining the reading scores of third graders.

Years earlier, I had run through these same woods with all of my might, looking for safety, trying to get away from campus. Tonight, I ran through the same woods looking for safety, but in the other direction.

We will do what others expect of us,” Wes said. “If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. If they expect us to go to jail, then that’s where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.

For the rest of us—those who snuck in despite coming from the margins—the mission has to be to pull up others behind us.

But for some of us, the promotion to adulthood, or at least its challenges, is so jarring, so sudden, that we enter into it unprepared and might be undone by it.