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“…and not one [house] had been left without pitting from shell fragments. Hundreds of refugees held to the side of the road as we passed, many of them wounded. The kids would laugh and shout, the old would look on with that silent tolerance for misery that made so many Americans uneasy, which was usually misread as indifference. But the younger men and women would often look at us with unmistakable contempt”

“Dawn’s pale light reached through the windows, vanishing the orgy’s petals. Everywhere glasses only half-drunk and cigarette butts. Everywhere parts of bodies scattered in sodomite disarray. An arm wrapped around a stomach, a leg tangled in oblivion. A brown torso with a loca’s drool pooling on the chest. A buttock or two peeping out from the draped sheets, dripping with the fluids of the proletariat.”

“I want a whole city underground if it does not
love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue’s vanishing and last for ten summers I don’t want apologies anymore

“Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy. And isn’t it funny, also, to imagine that the only time God judges us is after we’ve died?”

“Sometimes the city reaches towards you to stay afloat.”

“If you know you know, and if you don’t then you’ve never had to answer a set questions that begin with a tone of curiosity and then gradually become more accusatory as they unfold.”

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THERE WERE HETEROSEXUALS WHO KNEW ABOUT FEMINISM

KENAN: But also, for instance, in "Bloodchild." I mean, the idea that sacrifice has to be...
BUTLER: Not sacrifice. No, no...
KENAN: You wouldn't call it sacrifice? Cutting people open?
BUTLER: No, no. "Bloodchild" is very interesting in that men tend to see a horrible case of slavery, and women tend to see that, oh well, they had caesarians, big deal. [laughter]

I am on a fool’s errand, which is trying to read more interviews with her so that I can conjure the shape of more of her writing in my mind. This stage is referred to as Bargaining.

I am always tempted to say “my heroes are dead and my enemies are in power,” and while the latter is true there are still very, VERY many artists I cherish still with us.

I just miss her very much, and thus: Bargaining.

“The plague arrived like a new way of colonizing, through a virus. It turned our feathers into syringes and the sun into a frozen drop of moon through the window.”

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?”

“Beauty is meant to pleasantly put us all in our places.”

Possibly the best memoir I’ve ever read, so it’s got that going for it ;3