Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.
If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.
Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.
The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.
I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.
Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.
I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.
Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.
When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.
The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.
I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.
People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.
I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.
A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else.
I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.
When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.
A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
How do you keep the black female body present, and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to? It's a question I try to answer through my own life.
You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.
If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.
I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.
I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in.
Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.
For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.
How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.
I always took note of them, because I think if you're in the black or brown body, you're negotiating them all the time. It's like women taking note of sexism. It's a kind of incoherency that you are constantly negotiating.
The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There's a letting go that comes with it.
I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.
I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.
One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?
I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.
Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.
I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.
You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you're a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live - you will live together.
You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn't belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.
I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here." And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.
I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, "What's wrong with me?" and begin to ask the question, "What's wrong with this place that I'm in?"
The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.
The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.
For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."
The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.
As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.