Zander Klein

“A photograph represents the past without bringing it to life. A photograph gives shape to history; it allows us to fashion a landscape of feeling, suppressing whatever other emotional detail is ungovernable. A photograph is a ladder that goes backward in time, a ladder we can push away whenever we want. With photographs, we can obscure the past as much as illuminate it.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Poetry simultaneously addresses our intellect and our physical senses, our emotions, imagination, intuition, and memory without asking us to divide them.”
― Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment

“I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body