I was inspired to begin compiling citations by . So much of writing, learning, and unknowing counts on us being in conversation with each other. Friends and comrades, won’t you sit and read with me? Please enjoy these citations that cook.
(Apologies in advance that I can’t provide page numbers since I have a kindle RIP)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
“The arduous work of coalition building—any campaigns first step—requires
constant deal making and compromise, even as the character of the struggle is redefined in the practice of producing consent. Or, as the singer-activist Bernice Johnson Reagon like to put it: “if you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you’re not in…a coalition (Reagon 1983)”
“In the scramble to institutionalize an identity—to secure a reliable, reproducible, public face—the stresses and strains sometimes degenerated in personality conflicts. Accusations of dis-respect flew furiously, and it was fairly common during meetings for people to step in outside, caucus in the driveway, and return with hardened faces and steely glares. As happened in the early days around the communist scare, some police made informal, friendly suggestions to ROCers (Mothers Reclaiming Our Children) about how they can enhance their legitimacy by distancing themselves from extremists.
What constituted extremism? For the police, extremism meant any willingness to face off with (and mouth off at) authority, particularly uniformed authority. But with the group’s logic, extremism seemed also to mean any combination of ambition and compromise.”
Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
“A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river than has no bridge, a garden of spears.”
“Ravathos called the life of a poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.”
“When I asked him why he had left, he quoted Leiya Tevorova: “I was spoken to by a god, and I found myself unworthy of him.”
Sam Cha, FUGUE: “A Briefe and True Report”1
“They’re still holding out this little bit of hope.”30 “This is a mental health problem.” “I love this shit. God, I tell you what, I thrive on it, the sheriff said.”31 “This American carnage.” “A recurring set of stylized images.” “We started praying for everyone involved.” “We do not allow this kind of content on Facebook.”32 “If they don’t think I’ll give the damn order to kill that motherfucker they’re full of shit, the sheriff said, laughing.”33 “Where the exact reality was.” “Must we always kill the people?” “Mostly it’s considered best to kill them.”34
31. [28] Beckett and Lartey.
[29] Hanna and Hartung.
[30]Facebook. Quoted in Solon.
Hanna and Hartung.
Twain.
mca, Unraveling
“Cast in this light, the Asian American bourgeois project furthers the obliteration of difference in favor of hegemonic universalism while celebrating vague multiculturalism. Identity, the model home, is no longer merely just an utopian overindulgence, but an undercurrent that projects the fantasy of homogeneity onto surroundings perceived as existential threats. Betrayal is justified by rehearsed narratives of personalized oppression(s). What endures is an anxious consciousness, sprouted by a janus of dishonest articulation and genuine inactivity, continually denying its own existence to evade responsibility for propagating the currency of recognition, authenticity.”
“To risk unknowability and fluidity is the preamble to perceived obliteration. It is a leap of faith. A vulnerable, revolutionary handshake, unenclosed and without demands, against further investment. If we are patient enough, dissolution opens a door elsewhere, to a different rhythm of time.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus
“I spend all this time alone in my apartment being queer and Cree in a settler state while that grief compounds. I haven’t even been writing lately; I’ve been binge watching all sixteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.”
“The political standard I hold myself to, I said, is that I have to exist in the world so as to refuse it.”
“Jack was seated behind a translucent barrier, which called to mind James Baldwin: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
“Into the stale apartment air, I said, Mom, I forgive you….Perhaps making room for my mother’s love, I thought, was a politics in and of itself.”
Patricia Nell Warren, One Is The Sun
“…..The girl’s thin, fine-boned hand shook a little as she studied her reflection in the mirror. The cut-nose was still here. It would be there till she died. Could it become a sign of great learning for her?
“Is…is that me?” she asked, voice quavering.
Then suddenly she growled, “Whoever sees my face behind my drawn arrow will know it is their day to die!”
Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study”
“Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break. This is held close in the open song of the ones who are supposed to be silent.”
“Whom do we mean when we say “there’s nothing wrong with us?” The fat ones. The one who are out of all compass however precisely they are location…The one who manage to evade self management in the enclose…our cousins. All our friends.”
“We went to the public hospital but it was private, but we went through the door marked ‘private’ to the nurses’ coffee room, and it was public. We went to the public university but it was private, but we went to the barber shop on campus and it was public. We went into the hospital, into the university, into the library, into the park. We were offered credit for our debt. We were granted citizenship. We were given the credit of the state, the right to make private any public gone bad. Good citizens can match credit and debt. They get credit for knowing the difference, for knowing their place…..Then we went to the barbershop and they gave us a Christmas breakfast, and we went to the coffee room and got coffee and red pills. We were going to run but we didn’t have to. They ran. They ran across the state and across the economy, like a secret cut, a public outbreak, a fugitive fold…They showed us this was the public, the real public, fugitive public, and where to look for it. Look for it here where they say the state doesn’t work….Anywhere you can, stay, conserve yourself, plan. A few minutes, a few days when you cannot hear them say there is something wrong with you.”
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Audre: …Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”—I will never forget that poem.
Adrienne: Where the traveler rides up to the door of the empty house?
Audre: That’s right. He knocks at the door and nobody answers. ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said and he has a feeling that there really is somebody in there. And then he turns his horse and he says, ‘Tell them I came,’ and nobody answered. ‘That I kept my word.’ I used to recite that poem to myself all the time. It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, what is it about, I don’t think I could have told you. But this was the first cause of my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise, when I couldn’t find other poems to serve.