Raina > Raina's Quotes

“Oh! And remember a few years ago when a dude in the US legit had Ebola and went bowling and ate chicken wings with friends instead of quarantining himself because #WhiteNonsense? Say it with me: Dumpster. Fire.”
― Phoebe Robinson, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay

“All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be "twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much. It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder. It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and the twenty-three-hour days for us.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“Some people don't believe that you can meet a person and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.”
― Lucille Clifton, Mercy

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
― Toni Morrison

“You can get there from here, though there's no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been.

"Theories of Time and Space”
― Natasha Trethewey

“What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou