Emma > Emma's Quotes

“As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less than human. That is hell on earth, that sense of unworthiness. That's what they inflicted on us.”
― Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

“We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we'd won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks.”
― Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

“But there were always things swimming around in me that I could neither hold on to long enough to comprehend or learn to live with. It was like the change in the air that comes before a storm. You feel the energy build but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. That’s what it was like for me. When those times came I couldn’t talk. There was no language for it. I suppose when you can’t understand something yourself it’s impossible to let anybody else in even if you’re motivated to.”
― Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

“Late in the evenings I’d walk into the trees, stride through the bush until I was wrapped in it, cocooned. The stars that pinwheeled above spun a thousand light years away. Time, mystery, departure and union were there all at once. I wondered if this was what it meant to be Indian, Ojibway. A ritual. A ceremony, ancient and simple and personal. If I could have borne it with me into the day-to-day life of the camp, things might have been different.”
― Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

“Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.”
― Elana Dykewomon, Sinister Wisdom 36: Surviving Psychiatric Assault & Creating Emotional Well-Being in Our Communities