Deborah A. Miranda > Quotes

“Sometimes something is so badly broken you cannot recreate its original shape at all. If you try, you create a deformed, imperfect image of what you’ve lost; you will always compare what your creation looks like with what it used to look like.”
― Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians

“As Cherokee writer Thomas King says, “Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”
― Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians

“This is how it is with me:
so strong, I want to draw the egg
from your womb and nourish it in my own.
I want to mother your child made only
of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed
from any man. I want to re-fashion
the matrix of creation, make a human being
from the human love that passes between
our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is:
when you emerge from the bedroom
in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back
over forearms, scented with cologne
from an amber bottle—I want to open
my heart, the brightest aching slit
of my soul, receive your pearl.
I watch your hands, wait for the sign
that means you’ll touch me,
open me, fill me; wait for that moment
when your desire leaps inside me.”
― Deborah A. Miranda, The Zen of La Llorona

“In 1851 and 1852, Congress appropriated and paid out over one million dollars in bounties to white men who harvested Indian scalps from the California goldfields--scalps taken from men, women, and children by men eager to make easy money.”
― Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir