Taylor Harris > Quotes

“It's quite possible that living in the liminal space between symptoms and answers has offered me too much loneliness, yes, but also space to breathe, distance from the settled grief of knowing.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“I am between from dust and to dust, and I just want him to be okay.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“During intake, you open your hand and hold forth, a memory stone laid in the riverbed of your past, a sort of memorial to, or witness of, fear.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“He gave life, they took his. No mother deserves to stand in the place where these two truths meet.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“The first time I heard the term liminal, I was eighteen, sitting in an African American Studies 101 class at the University of Virginia. A tall and slender Professor Penningroth, his complexion like my mother's relatives, had written the words Middle Passage in the center of a black chalkboard. He walked us through not just the number of Black bodies taken or the number of years over which they were stolen, but what it might have been like to be yanked into a void. To live (or die) between what was and what would be.

The concept felt close and easy, like something I'd always known. The idea of a space without bounds that held within its hull the power to harm or to free or to form-that idea has never completely left me. Would I have thought as an undergrad that liminality might one day describe some of my experiences as a Black woman in America? Yes. Would I have guessed liminality might describe my future experiences as a mother, wading through waters of science and faith, in search of the truest way to know my son? Not al all. And yet here we were, drifting from the shore of one unknown to the next. Caught somewhere between "no longer" and "not yet." It was getting harder to discern where the journey had begun and where, if ever, it would end.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“The foundation is not firm, but we hold up the papers, saying, "Look, it is written..." as though the men who wrote and signed the papers were God and not idols of privilege.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“In the worst moments of a person’s life, other people are watching TV, surfing the internet, folding clothes, having sex. People engage in the utterly mundane while others slip away.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

“I worried she was like me, quietly collecting threats, clutching them tight in her hands, until the day she'd look down and panic, unable to separate her own hands from the fear they held.”
― Taylor Harris, This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown