Danielle Evans > Quotes

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,

-Lucille Clifton”
― Danielle Evans

“It felt unfair, how absurd someone could be and still be terrifying.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other. -James Baldwin”
― Danielle Evans

“It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael's door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think pussy.”
― Danielle Evans

“The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.”
― Danielle Evans

“In Genie's presence, I felt revealed by the only nearby witness to my life as a whole.

-The Office of Historical Corrections”
― Danielle Evans

“How's conquering the world going, my sweet ruthless girl?' in the delighted dumbed-down tone you would use to tell a house pet it was ferocious. She would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn't see something in her didn't mean it wasn't there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did not fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would be.”
― Danielle Evans

“All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is.”
― Danielle Evans

“She thought that the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.”
― Danielle Evans

“It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.”
― Danielle Evans

“I was twenty-four and convinced that the life in which I made some critically important difference to everyone around me could start on my command, that the world was only waiting to know what I asked for it.”
― Danielle Evans

“...and her parents had given her the twice as good for half the credit lecture, when she wanted, just once, for someone to tell her that she was already good enough and it wasn't all right if the world wasn't fair enough to reward it, wanted someone to acknowledge that even this trivial thing was allowed to hurt, and that particularity of the unfairness had a name.”
― Danielle Evans

“She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.”
― Danielle Evans

“In order to write anything, I had to get to a place where I felt like if I never wrote another word I was still loved and valued as a human and could find a way to exist in the world. Only after that could I see clearly what was already on the page.”-Danielle Evans”
― Danielle Evans

“I had the peculiar confidence of only children, the boldness that came from being doted on but alone often enough to be oblivious to my own strangeness.”
― Danielle Evans

“He wrote to whom it may concern, but it concerned no one.”
― Danielle Evans