Joshua Whitehead > Quotes

“... humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“...leaving home always hurts--home isn't a space, it's a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn't always comfortable--”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“My home is full of hope and ghosts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I didn't have the heart to tell him everything, didn't have the courage to say, man, feeling like that's going to break you if you ain't careful.

"It's my first time, y'know," he said, as if I didn't know. "I hope I didn't do anything wrong. Did I make any mistakes?"

"Mistakes?" I tried hard not to laugh. "Well, let's see, your first mistake was asking that." Then I put my hands on his shoulders and pressed my forehead against his. "And your second one was you thinking you ever owed me a goddamn thing.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“The nurses were busybodies, I could hear them scurrying about in the rooms adjacent to ours. They were telling jokes and laughing. Their happiness pissed me off. Stop fucking laughing, I thought, my kokum's lying here dead...She wrote up a report and closed my kokum's eyes, then walked out of the room and summoned a doctor. In the room beside us, another nurse was still laughing. Sometimes I don't like how life goes on. And sometimes I don't think it should.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I am my own best medicine.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Now living has become a series of hauntings, poltergeists, revenants that flock to the entrances to my ceremonial spaces and enter without regard or invitation.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays

“Funny how an NDN "love you" sounds more like, "I'm in pain with you.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Finishing a seven-hour wank session, feeling exhausted, overworked, burnt out, underpaid, sad, hungry, lonely, nostalgic, and strangely beautiful during a one a.m. Sev-run.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I constanly ask myself if all writing is a form of mourning.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays

“Maybe we're more like dandelions. A weed that's a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an Indian home is like a dandelion, pretty, but disposable and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck. My home is full of hope and ghosts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“And I thought about now, thought about my mom’s advice: if I want to survive, I’d have to leave. But it’s hard, you know? Each second I’m away from home is time that’s gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end. How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“The land, like the body, teaches us the fundamental rule of ending: that no such thing exists, no suffix of "-ed" shall ever touch the prefix of "pre-" and even a body in its most cellular state knows this.
We always begin at the end.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays

“Your circle is not round. All beings require more than one tide. Even desert animals live underwater.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“These days I find myself far too often talking with myself. The wind ruffles my hair; I hold my palms out to the darkness and wait for someone to take me.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“In the north, we were hit with wave after wave of refugees from the rapidly growing deserts and work camps. For a time, the wall of bureaucracy kept out everyone but the wealthy and the truly desperate. When that failed, our government let go of its tight-lipped politeness. They began with the indirect murder of thousands via returned refugee ships and denied claims, then came out into the open with the visible murder of families torn apart at borders and the mass incarceration and enslavement of the undocumented.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“Sometimes, I think of mourning as if it were a haunting.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays

“We need only ask, humble ourselves, and be unafraid to ask for help in times of need, for us to receive exactly what it is we need.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“Two-Spirit and Indigiqueers are the wildest kinds of biopunks, literally and literarily.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“the fall left me with a dent in my clavicle, wide enough to contain both of those women's many tears.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I ask, “How do we build a relationship with this new planet?” She laughs. “I would assume like all consensual relationships: we ask them out.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“Sometimes, when it’s the apocalypse, you have to just do things for yourself.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“I just laughed. I think he got mad. I wish he knew that when an Indian laughs it's because they're applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I just laughed. I think he got mad. I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs it's because they're applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.”
― Joshua Whitehead

“Nobody prepares you for the sting when you're about to leave home. All my life I wanted to leave the rez - and every time I was about to, I stopped myself. It hurts. Leaving hurts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“soon learned that she believed in the creation of and adherence to complex systems. I was hungry for chaos.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

“we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“What does it mean to be Two-Spirit during an apocalypse? What does it mean to search out romance at a pipeline protest—can we have intimacy during doomsday?”
― Joshua Whitehead, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction