Zinzi Clemmons > Quotes

“I've amazed myself with how well I've learned to live around her absence. This void is my constant companion, no matter what I do. Nothing will fill it, and it will never go away.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I've often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you're out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart's desires.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“She comes to me in snatches - I remember pieces of her laugh, the look she gave when she was upset. Sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn't come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.


This is what it's really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible.

How pernicious these little things called memories are. They barbed me once, but now that I no longer have many of them, I am devastated.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 - 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia - all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I thought about how every place on earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others failing, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“In this regard I find myself dubious about the politics of women’s peace groups, for example, which celebrate maternality as the basis for engaging in antimilitarist work. I do not see the mother with her child as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-righteousness. I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me?”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn't yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn't long before he'd used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“But as I stood there with those mathematics in hand, the weight of the moment on me, I said nothing. And when I tried to speak, only tears came. The pain was exponential. Because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain. I realized that this would be life; to figure out how to live without her hand on my back; her soft, accented English telling me Everything will be all right, Thandi. This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“A ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it. The cat-ghost is a symbol of the woman's grief.

...

I chose to create a ghost, for the purpose of my own comfort. It made me happy to think that my mother still existed somewhere and that she could help us right after her passing.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Yes, there is that dark, terrifying loneliness that scares me, but I am acquainted with fear. If I stay inside it long enough, root my heels in deeper, it doesn’t feel scary anymore. It feels like home.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“A ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I realized that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“If there is a person who has never eaten a tangerine or a durian fruit, however many images or metaphors you give him, you cannot describe to him the reality of those fruits. You can do only one thing: give him a direct experience. You cannot say: “Well, the durian is a little bit like the jackfruit or like a papaya.” You cannot say anything that will describe the experience of a durian fruit. The durian fruit goes beyond all ideas and notions. The same is true of a tangerine. If you have never eaten a tangerine, however much the other person loves you and wants to help you understand what a tangerine tastes like, they will never succeed by describing it. The reality of the tangerine goes beyond ideas. Nirvana is the same; it is the reality that goes beyond ideas. It is because we have ideas about nirvana that we suffer. Direct experience is the only way.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“When I was a child, my mother would try to convince me of a woman's need for a secret stash. "It can be anything: land, property, even a couple hundred dollars. You know, in case anything goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there." Her mother had told her this, as her mother before had told her.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“We never raised the morality of the action, because our politics took care of that.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“I don't sleep for two night. Instead I am wide awake and tossing. Each day I feel less like the person I was the day before, my body hurtling so fast in one direction that my mind cannot keep pace. I can scarcely remember who I was before my body became like this. I dream in bright, swirling colors. The dreams are so vivid that they linger with me long after I've woken up, I feel the same feelings that grip me at night while I'm at my desk, or on the subway. I will freeze, lost in them-scared, worried, or comforted in the same way-for hours.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Her disease only reinforced how the world saw us: not black or white, not American or African, not poor or rich. We were confined to the middle, and would always be. As hard as she tried to separate herself from the binds of apartheid, we were still within its grip. It had become the indelible truth of our lives, and nothing—not sickness, not suffering, not death—could change that.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“There is a casualness bred from familiarity that makes me at ease around him, that drew me to him in the first place.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Sometimes, my dreams of my mother are pleasant. They are peaceful dreams. In them, I barely register her presence, but her presence is what colors them with warmth and comfort. It is enough to make me still feel warm and nurtured after I wake up.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“ghost is not a fact in itself; rather, it is a symbol for a need. The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it. The cat-ghost is a symbol of the woman’s grief.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Chronic pain is one of the most difficult states for humans not suffering from it to imagine. That is because most of us experience pain only for moments, or, maximum, for a few days during an extended stay at the hospital, and even then it is not constant. Few of us will experience the level of pain that does not respond to”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“The pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell us we had been hit by lightning. Despite our fright, no damage had been done to the plane. The rest of the passengers, including my parents, all seemed to forget the incident after this, but I was frozen in my seat, terrified. My mother noticed and called for an attendant to bring me a glass of red wine. The alcohol soothed the circling thoughts of danger and fear, and soon I fell asleep, though something of this moment never left me.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“When you have chronic pain, the feeling that most people experience only in peaks becomes your baseline. Its effects are similar to those of the drugs that are often used to treat it. It is mood altering, causing changes in personality and even hallucinations. Pain can be a disease in itself.”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Aish, my mother said into her trifie, "the worst times are when I wake up and I think, I have to call Mama to say hello."
I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart's desires”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“Why (and to whom) is it appealing to think you are in another city besides the one, in Africa, that you are in?”
― Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

“His apartment is on the top floor of a three-story building in King. The landlady is an old Rusian woman who smokes at the bottom of the back stairwell and cries every night. She has no family and no visitors; her life is a mystery that I fill in with tragedy.”
― Zinzi Clemmons