Sucre > Sucre's Quotes

“We should seek out all the doors which still remain ajar, however slight the opening might be.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave –
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl.”
― Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works

“To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“Maybe, a decade older than I was, he knew what I would eventually learn: it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted & still alive?
Who knows this story but the elephants & the trees?

Who says the grace of a black man in motion is not perfect
as a tusk in the sun or a single leaf taking its sweet time to the ground?”
― Danez Smith, [insert] boy

“Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“My heart is a thin thing, these days - shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitiveness to certain of society's intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance which exceed the limits of legality - redress through electoral channels is the liberal's panacea.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation... What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.”
― James Baldwin

“No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half hidden.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means I'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling's approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things which happened to be true at the age of seventeen.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“I could not let her go, even though so much of me wanted to. An old dream of us together forever in a landscape blinded me.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“A book that doesn’t mention my language or my country, and has maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an illegitimate child on Mother Earth. Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“My grandfather kept the key to his house in Yaffa in 1948. He thought they would return in a few days. His name was Hasan. The house was destroyed. Others built a new one in its place. Hasan died in Gaza in 1986. The key has rusted but still exists somewhere, longing for the old wooden door.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“When I was asked to fill out a form for my U.S. J-1 visa application, my country, Palestine, was not on the list. But lucky for me, my gender was.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“The lemon in a poem, it might be the same lemon I saw on the tree; when he’s talking about the sun, it’s the same sun. I’m invited to notice and enjoy things that I usually can’t see when I’m afraid. So, to me, as a reader and poet, poetry can show things I never saw before. It also can bring my attention to something I saw but never enjoyed. And lastly, it assures me that I live on the same earth that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others inhabited.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“And after treatment, when my body was wrecked, when my body was like a car with parts that kept falling off, when I failed at, as U.S. disability laws calls it, "basic activities of daily living," I wondered how all those dollars had passed through my body and I was still left in such bad shape. If I calculated the cost of each breath I took after this cancer, I should breathe out stock options. My life was a luxury good, but I was corroded, I was mutilated, I was uncertain. I was not okay.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with preemptive worry, aka now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two. Illness that never bothered to announce itself to the senses radiates in screen life, as light is sound and is information encrypted, unencrypted, circulated, analyzed, rated, studied, and sold. In the servers, our health degrades or improves. Once we were sick in our bodies. Now we are sick in a body of light.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

“But if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

“The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth