Jennifer Givhan > Jennifer's Quotes

“She knew what they thought was happening. She knew what they thought.
But here’s what she saw. Once upon a time, there was a girlchild. A brand new girlchild, smiling. So innocent, so new. Her mama held her tightly, and she was safe. The end.
After all, Jesus rose again, didn’t he? And his mama must have held him. Mother Mary in a teal robe, clinging to her child—Pietà turned beautiful. Restored to babe in arms.
Bianca’s daughter had returned. Her Jubilee. And she wouldn’t let her go.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Jubilee

“She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground, where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star, and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful.
Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her.
Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship?
She’d never know.
What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice.
Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself.
She hadn’t.
Awareness must come. And it did. Too late.
If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half-starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe.
She knew that, deep inside.
Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms.
These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world.
Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl.
She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust.
She swept it away on her jeans.
A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this.
But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.
 ”
― Jennifer Givhan, Jubilee

“In the place Calliope had bled, a trail of corn sprouted behind her. She picked the two tallest corn shoots then sat beside two large, smooth stone metates for grinding. From within her husk rebozo, she pulled a mano, shucked the corn, laid it on the altar, and with the mano in both hands, she began moving with the weight of her whole body, the strength of her shoulders and back pressing down through her arms, back and forth, shearing, until the corn became a fine yellow powder.
The Ancients sang her on as she worked. When the Earth has had enough, she will shake her troubles off. She will shake her troublemakers off. She scooped this and mashed it into the butter of her hands. Rolled it into a ball, flattened it again. Shaped and shaped until the corn grew into a child, who sprang from the stone of her hands, laughing.
For she was finished, and sank into the earth, solid, hardened, at peace. And as her corn-made child ran from the mound to the grass below, the spirits intoned. The Earth has all the power she needs.
When she decides to use her power, you will know.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“The rocks pummeled her belly. Something rose in her throat and when she tried to speak, from her mouth she dislodged a rock. She was made of rocks. She couldn’t move from the fossilized casing she’d once called her body.
Heat crackled nearby. A conversation wove through the fire. A child’s sweaty body curled at her lap, chest rhythms of breathing, up and down, pressing against her.
'I didn’t want to believe it was happening again.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“A shock of light. Unbelievable light. Blood orange swallowing the Albuquerque evening. A pulling in, taking back, reclaiming something stolen. Halfway home from her Saturday-morning lecture, Calliope Santiago drove across the river toward West Mesa and the Sleeping Sisters, ancient cinder-cone volcanoes in the distance marking the stretch of desert where she lived. Only now she could see no farther than two feet ahead of her from the blinding light, the splotches in her eyes bursting like bulbs in an antique camera. She blinked, not sure what she was seeing. She meant to cover her eyes. Meant to shield her sight.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“My god
is frozen-mouth. She is get-out-of-this-town-

or-hell-freezes-over. She is paycheck
to paycheck. Each night when she goes to bed, my god

kisses her kids’ clean faces, then, thanking herself, her own.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Protection Spell

“What I’m asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?”
― Jennifer Givhan, Protection Spell

“The balding headstones
of the others—quarantined

from their own mothers & sisters & daughters—
I wondered if they, like us, were strange

alloys of sadness & forgetting
the words to the songs.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Landscape with Headless Mama

“What a petty child she’d been, thinking herself so high and intellectual, a crab who’d escaped the bucket—only to find herself in the fisherman’s mouth.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“Miracles happen every day, her mother had said, if you know where to look, if you know HOW to look. Not through the microscope, mija. Through the kaleidoscope of your heart.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“The white man’s bible is only one end-of-the-world myth.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“How have you done it? Reconciled your people’s beliefs with your scientific knowledge?”

“There’s not really a chasm, they’re part of the same story.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“...better to accept a mystery than an explanation with no logic.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“We are ruled by the laws of nature,” Chance had said when the car had broken down and neither he nor Calliope could fix it. “Only, I’m afraid try as we might, we don’t always know those laws, though in our human arrogance we think we do.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“Look, believe whatever you want. I’m not asking you to believe. You’ve seen the Suuke. You’ve seen the landscape utterly changed. You’ve seen a forest burst from nowhere, overnight. You’ve seen volcanic ash disappear when your books tell you it should have lingered. Yet you don’t believe anything you’ve seen. Science is about more than what the Western world tells you is true. It’s about finding answers for what we see around us. Well, I’m saying let’s find answers.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“So you fought hard to survive, and you have. And you've made do. You can't fault yourself for making your happiness where you are. That's what we do. All we can ever hope to do.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Trinity Sight

“Dreams are tunnels. They usher us between landscapes, memories, time. They wormhole us between worlds. Dreams connect us to the many selves we are in other places. The choices we almost made, could have made, but for whatever reason, did not make. Parallels split and some other iteration of the selves we nearly were go strutting about their business, unaware that we were once joined together, once twinned, mirrored at the center. Unaware that one flick of the tongue, flick of the wrist, one detail different, one movement unmade, and it could have been us through the blackness of space, through the membrane-thin wall separating us, and landing on the other side, atoms floating, atoms loving, atoms breaking apart and reshaping in the endless dance of the expansion into whatever comes after nothingness. Dreams are glimpses through all this invisible matter.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Jubilee

“As we wind through the graves, I’m reminded of growing up down the road from the town dump to the north and the cemetery to the south, my own house haunting the center, equal radius to either destination: dumping ground or burial. Mama’s ghost skirted the edges; I could feel her presence, but not nearly enough. Girlhood nights I used to sleepwalk, and Alba would find me, wriggling through the slats in the fence, kneeling at the makeshift altar I’d made of debris, all that wreckage, a shrine for the mama I never knew, and my staunch and sturdy saint of a sister would walk me home where I’d claim no memory in the morning. Dreamworld would merge with waking, and I felt it—embryonic, swelling, lucent, what would sprout inside me as I grew older, rasher—the city of the Dead. Where I accidentally sent Karma a few short years later. Where—I can’t shake the clawing feeling now—I’ve sent Cecilia as well, with my vitriol, with my jealousy.”
― Jennifer Givhan, River Woman, River Demon

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a type of courage that cannot always be seen. It's a bravery that you have to choose for yourself. You use it in the little, seemingly insignificant choices and decisions you make each day. Keep making these tiny, good choices over and over until you realize your whole life is different and the hero who saved you is yourself.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“I’ll leave you with this. There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we’ll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere, will say, “Don’t do it. You don’t have what it takes to survive the wilderness.” This is when you reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself, “I am the wilderness.” To my father: Thank you for insisting that I always speak up and take a stand— even when you passionately disagree”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“I love the song of the mockingbird,
Bird of four hundred voices,
I love the color of jade
And the intoxicating scent of flowers,
But more than all I love my brother, man.”
― Nezahualcóyotl

“In fact, I think it’s usually those who least deserve something, good or bad, that end up finding it on their doorstep.”
― James Wade, Beasts of the Earth

“Her daughter’s body will not be sluiced from the water. She will not salt the earth with her daughter’s bones.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones

“Intergenerational trauma is like a train leaving the station against our will—it keeps barreling relentlessly down the tracks.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones

“Every moment as a mother has felt like tending a fickle garden. Too little water, and they wilt from neglect—just as Mal did under Mami’s inattention. But just as overwatering a succulent can drown it, too much affection can be a burden.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones

“Humans hate being in the dark, don’t we?’ Griselda says. ‘We’re such curious animals.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones

“People need to see a body to grieve well and let go. They need to see the bones.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones

“A small town will make monsters everywhere. That part Mal had always understood.”
― Jennifer Givhan, Salt Bones