Danzy Senna > Quotes

“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.”
― Danzy Senna

“We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called "Never." All the things we would never do. Let's never get married. Let's never get fat. Let's never sleep with a married man. Let's never stop being students, even after we graduate. Let's never get dull-eyed and ironic. Let's never get stuck in a rut-- or trapped in a life we didn't choose. Let's never grow bitter.”
― Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

“You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.”
― Danzy Senna

“He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere. But it’s a good place to be, I think. It’s like floating. From up above, you can see everything at once. It’s the only way how.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said “I love you” to each other. How they had said only “I miss you.” At the time, I hadn’t been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love—by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank. My mother once told me to live my life as if I were already dead. “Live each day as if you know it’s gonna be gone tomorrow,” she had said. That was how my parents loved each other, with a desperate, melancholy love, a fierce nostalgia for the present.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“Jane's father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn't want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That's what white people didn't understand. Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“much privilege leads to bad manners,”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.”
― Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

“Don't hate white people. They can't help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers--their understanding of race is so basic. They can't be faulted for being uncomfortable with somebody who has what amounts to a graduate degree in race--that is, us. It's not fair for preschoolers to be placed in the same classroom with graduate students and be forced to compete. Pity them, Maria. Take their hands and explain very slowly and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field.”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“A therapist had once told her that if she had a baby she was going to have to lower her standards. Otherwise, she’d be the only person she felt was good enough to care for her child, and her husband would get away with not helping at all. If you lowered your standards, the therapist told her, you would end up with a coparent who did some things very badly but some things well—and your kids would be better off because they’d have two parents who weren’t resentful and overburdened. The same could be said about sitters. You had to lower your standards, or you’d never get away and replenish yourself.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She'd had her own childhood of moments just like this. She too had parents who were over-educated and underpaid - it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggest class and privilege without actual class and privilege - gauche caviar without the actual caviar.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Once, so long ago, she’d made a list of all the cities she’d lived in her life and the impression they’d left on her. Brooklyn to her was the grayest. London was the warmest. Paris was the coldest. San Francisco was the whitest. Atlanta was the blackest. Cambridge was the bluest. Los Angeles was the loneliest and the most free.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Our eyes caught, and I saw her as she had been and would always be, a long-lost daughter of Mayflower histories, forever in motion, running from or toward an unutterable hideaway.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn’t want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“Novel writing was too much. It was such a relief to dispense with the tangle of language—all those heavy blocks of prose she’d had to wade through to world build as they called it in workshop. Novel writing was too many different jobs under the title of one. You had to be all the actors, like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. You had to be the character of the mother, the father, the son, and the daughter, the mailman, the dog, the murderer, and the victim. But it was worse even than that. Because you also had to be the set designer, the set builder, the gaffer, the lighting man. You had to make it rain and make the sun come out, describing every change in the weather so the reader could smell and feel it. And the only tool they gave you to do all this labor was language.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field. Love, Gloria”
― Danzy Senna, New People

“I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.”
― Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

“Do you think our luck is changing?” “I don’t believe in luck. I believe in resilience. As an artist, you have to be resilient above all else.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to your sticking with it.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Every generation must leave an impression. And it had to keep pressing into the group ahead of it until the impression was made permanent. Then a fresh generation would be born and look around, bewildered, at their elders and assert some newfangled idea that years from now would make perfect sense.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“What world do you write about?” Jane liked his question. What world? He was clearly somebody who understood how this worked.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jujubean is gonna probably marry a white guy, and her kids will marry white people and I’ll end up with some Abercrombie & Fitch motherfuckers for grandkids. It’ll be a Quincy Jones Christmas extravaganza. I’m paying fifty-fucking-thousand dollars a year for my own extinction. If that ain’t some volunteer slavery, what is?”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“people don’t realize that the thing that separates real artists from wannabes is real ones finish what they started. Persistence. Commitment to a work nobody seems to want or need until you show them what it was they were missing. Like with my students, it’s always how I can separate the wheat from the chaff, you know? There are some students who work with a relentlessness, an urgency, and cannot be swayed from finishing a piece. And there are others, some of the most talented ones, who are just doing it for the praise. And you sort of know they’re not going to be artists, not in the real sense. They’re going to give up, go into graphic design or advertising or whatever. Real artists are relentless.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jane had no urge to return to the East Coast, not anymore - but on days like this, she did miss it, the drama of the seasons, the changing mood ring of the sky, even the statues of old white men, something solid she could rail against.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Origins sure are powerful and sh*t. You can’t shake them.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia