Kei Miller > Quotes

“To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“For here is the truth; each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Whenever he cried, his grandmother would always tell him, You need a backbone, boy. She thought this was the way to raise a man-child without quite understanding that sometimes it takes backbone to cry the long length of tears required.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Some days have more roads than others, and some roads more distance, so that when a woman complains how long the day is, maybe she is counting its roads rather than its hours.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Maybe you shake your head, but let me learn a lesson right now: plenty knowledge is in this world. Enough knowledge that you can pick and refuse. And if you want, you can refuse to know plenty things, don't care how true those things be. I know things you does not know, and things you will never know. And it is sake of that - sake of this knowledge - that people have looked on me and called me old fool or crazy. They treat me like I is retarded. Imagine that. I is the idiot because I know what they don't know.”
― Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman

“a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing
and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight.”
― Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

“How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word
for it -- at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers.”
― Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

“To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt – the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“The great philosophical question goes: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound? But this is a troubling question, exalting one kind of being above all others. What then of the ears of snakes, or wood frogs, or mice, or bugs? Do they not count? What then of grass, of stone, of earth? Does their witness not matter? If a man flies in Jamaica, and only the poor will admit to seeing it, has he still flown? (...) Always - always - there are witnesses.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Look, this isn't magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don't get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You might as well consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“It don't take no great skill to write down a story. All you have to do is put one word after the next and you continue like that until it done. But it take a special skill to hear a story-to incline your ears toward what may seem like silence. For nothing in this world is silent, you just have to learn how to hear.”
― Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman

“If you hear him beat that drum he will reveal something of himself to you, for what is a drumbeat, after all, other than the sound of a great hollowness, like death amplified ?”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“To pack up and go back home is not an easy thing, for there is no space waiting for us. We must create that space all over again. People grow. They change.”
― Kei Miller, The Same Earth

“She knew that for people to be people, they had to believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it, for once you believed in something, in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Know this,
that lions who trod don't worry bout reaching Zion. In time
is Zion that reach to the lions.”
― Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

“What the Mapmaker Ought to Know
On this island things fidget.
Even history.
The landscape does not sit
willingly
as if behind an easel,
holding pose
waiting on
someone
to pencil
its lines, compose
its best features
or unruly contours.
Here, landmarks shift;
they become unfixed
by earthquake
by landslide
by utter spite.
Whole places will slip
out from your grip.”
― Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

“Draw me a map of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?”
― Kei Miller

“Now focus. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. We have gone inland. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar - a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin - as if a kind of ruin has befallen them.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Maybe sometimes you have to tell a story crossways, because to tell it straight would ongly [sic] mean that it go straight by the person's ears who it intend for. For consider the words of Jesus when the blessed Savior go up on the mountain him did decide to speak in parables. He never just tell them that all of them was heathens, and that not a one of them could reach Heaven without him. Instead he talk bout hard ground and soft ground and ground that was full of macka and thorns; . . . him talk bout a lost sheep who finally make him way home. And maybe it afterwards, when you gather all of these crossway stories, and you put them together, that you finally see a line had been running through all of them. Sometimes you have to tell a story the way you dream a dream, and everyone know that dreams don't walk straight." (251)”
― Kei Miller

“She knew that for people to be people, they have to be believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it , for once you believed in something , in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“Agatha Lazarus found out then that there is a moment when a dream is so utterly crushed, that instead of withering the dreamer will explode. Such is the ache and violence of disappointment.”
― Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman

“You is the kind of man who could reach well far in the civil service,’ the supervisor said, probably recognising in Ozzie a pretentiousness and the kind of focused and intractable anal-retentiveness that is often mistaken for intelligence.”
― Kei Miller, The Same Earth

“And now everybody get the understanding that Gilzene did get. A man cannot rise on his own. Not even a powerful man like Alexander Bedward. Him did need us. Him did need Augustown. It was we who had to push him up into the sky. It was we who had to show our faith to the governor and everybody else.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“And I realise I am afraid of earth, the way it holds us, making useless things out of wings.”
― Kei Miller, There Is an Anger that Moves

“...for this is a madness that is beautiful and terrible and powerful all at once.”
― Kei Miller, The Last Warner Woman

“What the Mapmaker Ought to Know

On this island things fidget.
Even history.
The landscape does not sit
willingly
as if behind an easel,
holding pose
waiting on
someone
to pencil
its lines, compose
its best features
or unruly contours.
Here, landmarks shift;
they become unfixed
by earthquake
by landslide
by utter spite.
Whole places will slip
out from your grip.”
― Kei Miller

“Soft-Paw did sound almost sad when he tell the bwoy-dem that he had a feeling he would love to always see August Town through the lens of the white gyal’s camera because he see things that he never see in all his twenty-nine years – a kind of loveliness in the people and the place.”
― Kei Miller, Kingston Noir

“This place was no freedom, and Massa Day was not done. Massa had only changed his name. He was no longer "Busha" or "Buckra" or "Massa". He was now "Boss" or "Miss" or "Sergeant." Sometimes Massa even changed his skin from white to black, making this whole freedom thing complicated. There was further to go; a longer journey ahead.”
― Kei Miller, Augustown

“And the ras says
it's all a Babylon conspiracy
de bloodclawt immappancy of dis world—
maps which throughout time have
gripped like girdles
to make his people smaller than
they were.”
― Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

“The story of Bedward,’ she says, ‘is not the one they been telling you. Is not the story of some fool-fool man who get it into him head that him could fly. And neither is it the story of a clumsy baff-hand man who fall out of a tree. You hearing me, child? The story of Bedward is something completely different – is the story of a man who try his best to do something big, and to reach higher than any of we did think a man like him could ever reach …”
― Kei Miller, Augustown