Jewelle Gomez > Quotes

“I think the most important thing for you to do in the meantime is live. It is a very involving job, which takes much concentration and practice.”
― Jewelle L. Gomez, The Gilda Stories

“For femmes, that evolving feminist thought reacquainted us with something we kind of knew already: men and women might mistake us for “just girls” when they see our makeup and fashions, but we were/are actually guerrilla warriors, fighting undercover in the war to save women from the continuing campaign to make us irrelevant fluff.”
― Jewelle Gomez

“if you’re going to use the word ‘dream’ in a poem, you had better be langston hughes.”
― Jewelle Gomez

“It's not an unkind thing to make a new home. And it will be one where all whom you love are welcomed.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“This week I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show (you'd love her: she's funny and brilliant and just happens to be a stunning butch), and she was interviewing the outgoing attorney general, Loretta Lynch, about the country's post election future. The entire show was like a burst of hope so bright I almost had to put on sunglasses. The African American attorney general, prim and plump, sat perched on a barstool talking to a white butch lesbian who has her own national television news show! The event was being recorded in the Stonewall Inn, the site of one of the first places where queer people fought back against police violence! (I was so nervous about being a lesbian in 1969, I hid the tiny newspaper clipping from you.) Simply that the interview was happening made me remember that there are people in the world who are not such egotistical, political careerists as to believe that human rights don't matter. Then, as if just showing up wasn't enough, Attorney General Lynch spoke a truth that is hard to remember from our short-lived perspective: "History is bigger than one turn of the electoral wheel." During your eighty-eight years on this plane, you saw numerous turns of the wheel, and many of them did not land on a prize. Still, toward the end of your life, you took me in and bestowed not just a roof and clothes and food but the gift of your history and the knowledge that we find hope inside ourselves.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“When I was on a book tour last year, I saw a sign in a bookstore in a seaside town in Maine that was carefully drawn with popular symbols of coastal living and these words were entwined: Hope anchors the soul. From that childhood that many might call "disadvantaged," I was anchored in the belief that most things are possible.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“What began with fury has become a decades long pursuit in search of meaningful responses to these political and philosophical questions: What is family? How do we live inside our power and at the same time act responsibly? How do we build community? How do we connect authentically across gender, ethnicity, and class lines?”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“I knew I lived in a country founded on the murder of the body and the spirit of others. Native American nations were decimated with little regret, Africans fell beneath the same juggernaut, and all of the bloodshed was aided and abetted by practitioners of Christianity who manufactured innumerable ways to glorify Manifest Destiny and slavery. The Founding Fathers thought it easier to subjugate by dehumanizing their prey; their descendants find it easier to subjugate their prey by humanizing and prioritizing corporate entities.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Pledge yourself to pursue only life, never bitterness or cruelty.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“Life was indeed interminable. The inattention of her contemporaries to some mortal questions, like race, didn’t suit her. She didn’t believe a past could, or should, be so easily discarded”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“Stop trying to make the perfect move; trust your instincts more. You’ve been through quite a bit in the past years. I’m sure you’re as good a student as you’ve always been.” “I can’t be a student for all my time!” “We are students for all our time if we’re lucky enough to know it.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“Your indomitable spirit survived whatever the mainstream culture threw at you, whether it was a malnourishing diet of endless corn as a child or the condescension of my high school guidance counselors. You had seen the worst that the United States had to offer and come through by virtue of determination and perhaps your own hope. Most importantly, you taught me that sense of hope and determination to me.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“I understood your hope came not from some belief in the triumph of good or the kindness of politicians and bureaucrats. Your hope came from within; something inside you harbored and nourished a spark that had not been squelched and would always burn inside you and those you were able to touch. I came to believe that light inside came from the pride of knowing you were part of a long line in history that could survive.”
― Jewelle Gomez, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Ghouls, perhaps. Some here are certainly that. What else can we call one who thrives on ripping out another’s throat, or on deceiving people into ruin or servitude. I would say they are ghouls.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“The simple fact that there's a title for him-husband-means he has a role in the family, whatever his ethnicity.”
― Jewelle Gomez

“We remain because this our home. We both have lost land here. Should we leave it all to them? I will not.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“You must look to me and know who I am and if the life I offer is the life you choose. In choosing you must pledge yourself to pursue only life, never bitterness or cruelty.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“We have life, but this does not mean we are better people. In fact, we must struggle even more than mortals do to remain good. How easy it is for goodness to have no meaning when punishment, retribution- or hell- have no meaning. It makes as much sense for Eleanor to choose thrill-seeking or Samuel to choose murder as it does for you and me to choose love and family.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“The answer is greed. We are dying of greed. I don’t know the cure for that.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“A repeating refrain I wrote for Bones & Ash, the theatrical adaptation of this novel, is the spine upon which the story rests: “We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange.” In order to answer any of the questions the book raises we must take blood—metaphorically speaking. That is, we must learn how to break through the surface, find the deep dangerous place where blood flows without hurting one other, and share all that we know and love in order to survive.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“Do you think you and Sorel will be together forever?” “Of course. Either in each other’s company, as we are now, or separate and in each other’s world. One takes on others as family and continually reshapes that meaning—family—but you do not break blood ties. We may not wish to live together at all times, but we will always be with each other.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“Gilda was no longer fleeing for her life.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“I hoped that reading the novel would give my mother a sense that my life as a queer black feminist is about something more than my choice of partners. It is also about a relationship to time and people and shared space.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“When this happens, when you must protect yourself or those in your care, the real sin would be in taking life easily. The only way to maintain any humanity is to remember the faces of those who’ve died. To carry them within ourselves so that whatever good might have remained in their spirits has someplace to dwell. You cannot kill, then forget their faces without forgetting some part of yourself.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“There is no brink of change. Change is not a cliff you jump off of or a doorway you pass through. There's a stream of change and we're always in it whether we notice or not.”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to their Younger Selves

“this moment past peak oil, a large percentage of blockbuster movies are apocalyptic; superheroes are in vogue. What does the black imagination have to offer to the survival of human life on planet earth?”
― Jewelle L. Gómez, The Gilda Stories

“We worked to find not a middle-ground, but a new ground that would support us both.”
― Jewelle Gomez