Stan Grant > Quotes

“Racism isn't killing the Australian dream. The Australian dream was founded on racism.”
― Stan Grant, Talking to My Country

“We fight still to be recognised in the Australian Constitution; that same constitution that has allowed laws to take away children; invade our homes and violate our privacy. In”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“How do we live with the weight of this history? How do we not fall prey to soul-destroying vengeance and resentment, yet never relent in our righteous demand for justice?”
― Stan Grant

“All community is in some way imagined”
― Stan Grant, Talking to My Country

“But for white people, being poor didn’t define them in the way our blackness defined us. Poverty itself could be temporary and if by chance or effort they broke its chains, there’d be a white world waiting. But”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“To criminologists these are statistics, to us they are mothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. These numbers have names and faces.”
― Stan Grant, Talking to My Country

“As a nation we must ask hard questions of ourselves and there is something that gnaws at me. Yes, it is important to remember, but do we also have to let go? Is forgetting the price we must pay for peace?”
― Stan Grant, Australia Day

“White people cannot be free while ever Whiteness rules.”
― Stan Grant, The Queen Is Dead

“Adam was told to toughen up. Get over it. We hear this a lot. History is in the past, bad things happened but it is time to move on. But history is not past for us. Adam”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“The forgetting bends time and space until the original sin recedes and appears as a dot on the horizon. Then the White Queen dies and is mourned, as those who have lived and died under the heaving weight of the crown are forgotten.”
― Stan Grant, The Queen Is Dead

“Storytellers work with and against history. In history we find difference and conflict, yet the storyteller must find us in each other.”
― Stan Grant, Australia Day

“My grandmother told me how the police would stop her in the street as she pushed her babies in a pram. They would upturn everything searching for alcohol, accusing her of running grog to the blacks. They obviously didn’t know her well. Ivy had never touched a drop of alcohol in her life. It didn’t stop with police harassment; the local hospital refused to take her when she was giving birth to her first child. Ivy had her baby in the back of a car as she was driven to a nearby town in the hope of a better reception. Ivy”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“When everyone is poor you don't know you're poor. My father worked so some of the boys thought I was actually rich.”
― Stan Grant

“It is there in comments such as: ‘You’re too pretty to be Aboriginal’ or ‘You’re too smart to be Aboriginal’ – yes, ask any indigenous person, we have all heard these back-handed offensive ‘compliments’.”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“Epigraph So will my page be Colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you . . . You are white – yet a part of me, as I am a part of you . . . Sometimes, perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! Langston Hughes: ‘Theme For English B”
― Stan Grant, Talking To My Country: The passionate and powerful bestselling book by critically acclaimed journalist and author of Tears of Strangers and The Queen is Dead

“Sometimes defiance is all we have”
― Stan Grant