Eveline Gordon > Eveline's Quotes

“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“...a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital is that you will not be believed about anything. A corollary to this feature: things will be believed about you that are not at all true.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“It's three years since my son died and I haven't dreamt about him once. I go to sleep with with his vest and trousers under my pillow. 'Come to me in my dreams, Sasha. Come and see me!'
But he never does. I wonder what I've done to offend him.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

“[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“According to a recent study, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist that they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“I admit it, I'm tired. Over the years, I've hidden away my suffering. I smile when I feel like crying. I laugh when I feel like dying. I have to stare at pictures of my children and my grandchildren to see them grow up. I miss the simplest things of ordinary life — having dinner with friends, taking walks in the woods. I miss gardening. I miss children's laughter. I miss dogs barking. I miss the feel of the rain on my face. I miss babies. I miss the sound of birds singing and of women laughing. I miss winter and summer and spring and fall. Yes, I miss my freedom. So would you.”
― Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings

“Coming out as trans was the first change she actually made to her own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against the grain because she felt like she'd die if she didn't.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
― Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam and Eve

“Leonid Andreev, whom I love very much, has this parable about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss. And now he's alien, he'll never be the same as other people, even though Christ resurrected him.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I haven't told you anything, really. Just snippets. The same Leonid Andreev has a parable about a man who lived in Jerusalem, past whose house Christ was taken, and he saw and heard everything, but his tooth hurt. He watched Christ fall while carrying the cross, watched him fall and cry out. He saw all of this, but his tooth hurt, so he didn't run outside. Two days later, when his tooth stopped hurting, people told him Christ had risen, and he thought: 'I could have been a witness to it. But my tooth hurt.'
Is that how it always is? My father defended Moscow in 1942. He only learned that he'd been part of a great event many years later, from books and films. His own memory of it was: 'I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive.' That's it.
And back then, my wife left me.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Though the experience of being 5150'd is not the same thing as being arrested ('You are not under criminal arrest'), there are inevitable parallels between involuntary hospitalization and incarceration. In both circumstances, a confined person's ability to control their life and their body is dramatically reduced; they are at the mercy of those in control; they must behave in prescribed ways to acquire privileges and eventually, perhaps, to be released. And then there is the wide swath of people for whom mental illness and imprisonment overlap: according to the Department of Justice, 'nearly 1.3 million people with mental illness are incarcerated in state and federal jails and prisons.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“Once, some friends and I were driving back from partying up there, in the middle of winter, on one of those perfectly clear and freezing nights. It was four in the morning and I was nodding in and out of hammered sleep, my vision mashed potatoes, we stopped so I could throw up at least twice. But as we drove with my face smushed on the window I noticed the field of snow along that stretch of the highway, all still and unmucked with. It looked brushed, almost. Or whipped. Designed. The patterns were the kind you'd see up close in a big rock. Sometimes you see that for far distances out here on the prairie, like a long white-blue sea. It's so gorgeous. And even with my brain's skeleton-crew state, I just thought, man. Everyone calls our part of the world bleak. But it's not bleak. I don't think it's bleak.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“I spend most of my time crying and praying for that bookish Moscow girl who doesn't exist any more.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

“My boy. My skinny little thing.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

“When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like an historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“There are two Mississippi Valleys. One is wet, the other dry. The river made the wet valley by flooding it with dirty water and filling it with mud. People made the dry valley by draining it of water and hardening mud into dirt. The two valleys exist in uneasy tension, the wet valley always ready to burst into the dry valley that holds it down.”
― Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina

“The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterways, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there came the muffled rattle of the Landing's window-shutters being drawn.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Slowly old creek-slime, filtering through the limestone springs, had dyed the water an evil color; the lawns, the road, the paths all turned wild; the wide veranda caved in; the chimneys sank low in the swampy earth; storm-uprooted trees leaned against the porch; and water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom's decaying piano. It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“It was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“She was, after all, one with the others covered over when the house sank, those whose names concerned the old Joel, whose names now in gnarled October freckling leaves spelled on the wind. Still Idabel was back, a ghost, perhaps, but here, and in the room: Idabel the hoodlum out to stone a one-armed barber, and Idabel with roses, Idabel with sword, Idabel who said she sometimes cried: all of autumn was the sycamore leaf and its red the red of her hair and its stem the rusty color of her rough voice and its jagged shape the pattern, the souvenir of her face.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty - they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better - forever - if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.' He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. 'You play it safe long enough,' he said, in a different tone, 'and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever - like me.”
― james baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You are - how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper - or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“If I am not here' said Giovanni, both vindictive and near tears, 'by the time you come back again, I will be at home. You remember where that is - ? It is near a zoo.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross the space and take him in my arms again - waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.
'Au revoir, Giovanni.'
'Au revoir, mon cher.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Middle-class gay white men argued that 'gay rights' should remain a legislative issue and that 'legally sanctioned gay marriage should be a primary concern for all of us.' Kunzel charts the ways that the forced forgetting of queer and trans prisoners was central to the coalescing of 'new gay norms,' 'gay respectability,' and homonormativity. This disciplining of the queer left was a racialized proect that coalesced around shoring up the privileges afforded by whiteness, gender normativity, and capital.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex