Stephanie Spines

“There were Italian neighbourhood and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable except in the name of the city itself. They'd only have to look, though, but it could be that what they know hurts them already, and what if they found out something even more damaging? These are people who are used to the earth beneath them shifting, and they all want it to stop-and if that means they must pretend to know nothing, well, that's the sacrifice they make.”
― Dionne Brand, What We All Long For

“Sometimes I'm so smart, I almost feel like a real person.”
― Graham Parke

“You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry.”
― Yrsa Daley-Ward

“Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye