Disembodiment Quotes

“Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never out of pockets, our whole manner ordered as if to say, "I make no sudden moves." Disembodiment.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Winnie felt better in the sunlight. She let her hand rest on the tree's ropy trunk. The bark was smooth beneath her fingers. These were the breed of strangling ficus that spent two hundred years braiding their bodies around a host tree, killing it while gradually assuming its form. Parasite, doppelgänger, sarcophagus. Winnie admired it. What she wished, she reflected dreamily, her whole back now leaning against the tree, was for the same thing to happen to her. For the new self she'd hoped she would become in Saigon a better self, a banyan self, resilient and impenetrable to encase Old Winnie completely in its cage-like lattice of roots and then let her wither away inside. She wanted there to be no trace left of that thirteen-year-old girl that Dr. Sang had remembered.”
― Violet Kupersmith, Build Your House Around My Body

“On good nights, Winnie managed to glean five nonconsecutive hours of a shallow and unsatisfying slumber. But those nights were
rare. Usually, Winnie was wide awake between midnight and dawn and
passed the time by staring at the street below the apartment. Her room did not have its own balcony, just one window outfitted with a cage-like lattice designed to keep out burglars. When the afternoon sun came through at the right angle it created shadowy tessellations on her bed, and Winnie would lie down and position herself so that the scales of light would be cast onto her own skin. After dark, she climbed up and perched motionless on the sill for hours with her legs poking out through the bars, until her lower half went numb. She liked the feeling of having nothing beneath her feet while she was three stories high. It allowed her to pretend for a moment that she was no longer a girl, just a hovering, discorporate displacement of night sky. Safely concealed by the treetops, she could clock the nocturnal comings and goings of the trash collectors and grilled-squid carts and irresponsible, drunk revelers driving home from bars, occasionally wobbling off the road and crashing into a utility pole.”
― Violet Kupersmith