Erasure Quotes

“When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It’s the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not being a hot sexy number but I am livid that—as a girl who doesn’t attract men—I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn’t even be around.”
― Virginie Despentes

“The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“You are correct in your observation that words in common use that are not written down would necessarily be excluded. Your concern that some types of words, or words used by some types of people, will be lost to the future is really quite perceptive.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“Literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song. I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect human vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky reworking of older keens. This, to me --- in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university --- feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verb ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence

“I keep a list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy. No matter how much I give of myself to household chores, each of the rooms under my control swiftly unravels itself again in my aftermath, as though a shadow hand were already beginning the unwritten lists of my tomorrows…”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Plainly put, the imperative to “be professional” is the imperative to be whiter, straighter, wealthier, and more masculine. A wolf in sheep’s clothing masquerading as a neutral term, professionalism hangs over the head of anyone who’s different, who deviates from the hegemony of white men.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“In the meantime, a massive and frightening bleakness inside me kept expanding and rattling. Sometimes I wrote about it in my diary, sensing that if I didn’t somehow fill the hollowness, it would swallow my heart and spit out my core. Other times I wished for the emptiness to scrape me off, a permanent erasure.
I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“At the time, presenting in this masculine of a fashion didn’t feel like selling out. But that, in and of itself, is part of the problem. Throughout my senior year, when I was faced with obstacles or competitive processes or selection committees, I reverted to masculinity out of fear every time. I feared discrimination at every turn, feared that if I were to truly wear my identity on my sleeve, I would lose everything.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Isn’t it interesting that you don’t even have to say “Duke Men’s Basketball”? You just say “Duke Basketball,” and everyone assumes you’re talking about the men’s team? As if the women’s team doesn’t exist? Isn’t it interesting that you just say “the NBA” and everyone knows you’re talking about the (Men’s) National Basketball Association? But if you want to talk about women’s professional basketball, you have to say “the WNBA”? Anyway.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Assertion, even self-assertion, does not invariably bespeak an urge to annihilate the opposition or to wield coercive power.”
― Robert Boyers, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies

“The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners’ version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses … Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don’t even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they’re ashamed.”
― Stephen King, It

“There is a kinship, between the climate scientists and the epidemiologists and the scholars of authoritarian states. The people who research worst-case scenarios are stuck breaking bad news while protectors of profit margins and purveyors of institutionalist mythologies market false assurances. The later remain successful not in spite of evidence, but to spite the evidence.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power's tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada's great books of history. That the nation's stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power's truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory

“Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Liberation is not just about movement from one place to another, but especially about how Exodus’ multiple movements become mechanisms for bringing liberation to the material and ideological structures of oppression in Egypt, the Wilderness, the Mountain, and beyond. The catalyst for exodus liberation movement (“let my people go”) serves a larger goal: “let my people live” —the hermeneutical and material transition from erased, marginalized, and singularized existence to creative freedom, wholeness, and community that enshrines the full flourishing of the material and interpretive soul/life.”
― Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

“Cute is the worst way to be. Cute is an act of erasure. Cute is gynophobia writ large.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

“The condition of being alienated and "othered" reflects the ways in which navigating Western societies as a Black person is an endlessly unsettling experience, something that might be ripped whole from the pages of a speculative novel. Because of this, the search for lost cultural touchstones is a gesture towards survival: it is an Afrofuturistic act. At its heart it is the creation of a possible future based on a reconstructed, or reimagined past. In this way, a ware is wages against erasure.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“So much of this story is about power and how it shapes our knowledge of the environment. By not trusting someone because of their gender, race, age, or class, we lose crucial information. We erase their contributions and discount their observations. Margaretta's and Elizabeth's respective lives and work illuminate the frustrating hurdles they faced as women, despite the privileges afforded to them by their wealth and race. The [Morris] sisters developed strategies and methods to counter the distrust, the exclusion, even the attacks. Despite all of that, they have been erased from the historical narrative. They have been forgotten.”
― Catherine McNeur, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science

“We all say "sunrise" and "sunset" despite the fact that we all also know that the sun isn't rising or setting. Language and labels are fluid. So while we need to resist the impulse to put people in boxes, we shouldn’t negate the value of labels, especially where dominant labels too often seem to erase the identities and experiences of the non-dominant.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“My great-grandfather survived the Sand Creek Massacre, and his son survived boarding schools, and his daughter, my mother, survived losing her mother and being raised by white people. And still brought us up knowing who we were. Who we are. Somehow. So why had I been sheltering the boys from their culture? Something made so strong it survived more than it should have survived. It was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“The fight for historical truth is always a fight for present dignity.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“A society that doesn’t understand the meaning of words will not recognize the theft of meaning.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“The most dangerous injustice is the one that flatters the educated while erasing the vulnerable.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“She wasn’t a protagonist. She wasn’t even a side character. She was a filler. A backdrop with blood and breath and no arc.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists

“The universe had no voice. Only script. But June had a voice. Cracked. Small. Raw. But hers.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists

“Some people were written in ink. They could not be erased. But I was pencil. And now, I’m the one holding the eraser.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists

“Luck is what decides whose name gets written in gold, and whose page is torn out before it begins.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists

“The story didn’t want to kill her. It wanted to write her in. To tame her. To turn her rebellion into a lesson.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists

“Somewhere very far from here, a blank page waits again. But this time, it’s not for a protagonist. It’s for the NPCs.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, The NPC Versus The Universe: A Metafictional Dystopian Thriller About Rigged Lives, Luck Privilege, and the NPC Who Starts Killing the Protagonists