Amber Dawn > Quotes

“Lying is the work of people who are told their truths have no value.
The labour of survival is laden with myth and misunderstanding.
Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“Morning came in through the blinds cutting everything into ribbons.”
― Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“and I loved long drives
how you can close your eyes,

then open, and everything around you has changed.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.”
― Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“I had spent so much time secretly scared of rape that in that moment I was hardly even afraid anymore. Or rather I had moved on to my next fear—what happens when it’s over? Would I be left there, alone? Injured? Or worse?”
― Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“Where does one
heal when the wound
is diagnosed a disorder?”
― Amber Dawn, Where the Words End and My Body Begins

“So tremendous, sadness
doesn't know where the world ends
and my body begins.”
― Amber Dawn, Where the Words End and My Body Begins

“When I was thinking about How Poetry Saved My Life entering the “big literary world” I more so viewed it as sub genre or an underdog book because there are still comparatively so few books about sex work, especially from authors who once worked street, like I have. Disclosing to working street-level sex work still feels risky to me. Apart from Runaway by Evelyn Lau (published in 1989) I have yet to read a first person memoir about street work. More of these stories must be out there—perhaps I just haven’t found them yet.”
― Amber Dawn

“Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“No, you don't write about love for the very same reason you refuse to learn to roller skate. You dislike the idea of introducing anything that requires hurting yourself repeatedly before you get good at it.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist.”
― Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“What would Samuel Becket say if he knew that Broadway musicals are all that survived of the theatre world?”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“I’m jealous – not of their money to spend, but jealous that, for them, going home is a simple matter of turning down the correct lane.”
― Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“...I learned the power of identity--the idea that even an uneducated woman, like myself, who hadn't read Mary Wollstonecraft or bell hooks, could be an expert on feminism simply because of her identity as a woman.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“Is desecration teaching?
Is violence knowledge? Is haunting
a kind of life? I had no model
for rebirth. No second coming blueprint.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“I...believe that passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice injures us--it widens the disconnect. The part of us that is hurting does not heal in the dark; we must turn on the light to look at it. We must pay attention.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“When this paragraph ends, this story is all yours.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“He has always been a silent gargoyle sitting at the head of our family table. I've pieced together his story from what little my relatives have shared in hushed disclosures and from reading other soldiers' biographies, visiting museums, and watching the documentary channel. I've adopted historic facts collected by experts and academics as my heritage. I've learned about my grandfather the way many of us (Generation Xers) learn about their elders, whose voices have been muted by dissociation, depression, alcoholism, trauma, and denial.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“[This] story ...is the one I recount to remind myself that I survived and that the worth of my life can be paid back with my truth and my stories.”
― Amber Dawn