blake > blake's Quotes

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“We unsealed the jails first,
Folks showed up swinging bolt cutters to liberate their lawless relatives into a world different from the society out of which they were exiled. Because no one stood guard any more. No longer could anyone be exiled from anywhere.
All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshiped long enough.”
― Cebo Campbell

“I suppose anything sounds righteous wher
you pay it enough respect.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Students flirted and
smiled at each other as effortless as sunlight on a breeze. So much life and so much energy. Easy to forget that half the world died. But then again, Charlie noted, neither grief nor calamity had ever stopped the joy of black people. We smiled through the worst the world had to offer, he thought. Smiled even when our lips bled.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Too sudden did America fall into hands unprepared to hold its bounty. Too few knew how to fish. Too few could skin a buck. Too few understood how to run a farm, or the mechanics of a clock, or the variable shapes of government. Only a fragile structure remained, consequently, without the reinforcement of porcelain beams, ultimately punctuating precisely who'd made that system and kept charge of its maintenance.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Charlie stood up and wandered the edges of campus, watching without engaging. In this new world, he could figure neither where nor how he fit. Charlie had conflict in his heart long before the event. Before prison. All the way back to when he first learned to define himself by the language in the eyes of others, quick to articulate their bias. Ubiquitous enough for him to question the rationality of his very existence, the conflict of Charlie's darkness could only be resolved in the way any black man sees himself, that insoluble calculus. Does he see himself from within, as a divine composite of the joys, fears, hopes, and passions that make up any human being? Or does he see himself through the eyes of the world and how it reacted to him? His darkness was as elementary a question as it was existential: Who was he?”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“She followed them underwater until she could no longer breathe and swam back for air. Until she could no longer see anything in those depths.
Until she no longer had strength to keep diving down. And she tried. Swimming, screaming, fighting. She tried her very best. To drown herself along with them. To feel what they felt. As she had been trying to all her life.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Charlie understood, in a way, that was just how the world now felt: blind, or all vision warped by having worn someone else's glasses.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“No one else wanted to be a black person in America. And everyone knew that fact, however cruelly the result played itself out. No matter the worry in their lives, they could all but count on a voice, redemptive and default, Whispering as a comfort to their hearts: At least I'm not them. And so they carried on, the injustice of it as natural and inconvenient to their lives as a bit of rain.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“And there were no lights on in the houses he passed. No movement at all. Only the vastness of the road, the treasure of America's immensity abandoned by its keeper. Nearly an entire nation seemed, suddenly, discoverable. He wondered if this was what Columbus felt: to look upon something already there with nothing to stop you from claiming every mile as yours.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“We finally inherited the earth and can't remember who we was back when it was promised to us to begin with.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Lucky because the world has tried to destroy
me in every kind of way, but I am still here. So are you. So are a lot of good people. Ain't no other people in the history of the world ever had so little of a serving of living as us. And now, we got all of it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Judgment, he understood, was the chief function in the life of any man's daughter, To declare her father, in the simple courage of living her way through this world, as a man o value. Or not.
In the harsh daylight, his conflict reorganized itself. He could never fully answer the equation of who he was or could be. But all he was to his daughter was an emptiness he could fill up with any version of himself he wanted
That's what the daylight revealed.
Within his daughter's innocence, a chance to reclaim his own.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Charlie watched his own child hold the gun with a concentration he'd witnessed many times before, a focus that did not see a life in its scope only threats, deserving—all of them, regardless of offense—equal penance.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“But like the bulk of a mountain broken down by wind and water, truth devolves. With enough lies, one cannot defend himself with his own truth no more than stone can stop a river. So, what is a truth when fact is no longer accepted as true?
Charlie's courtroom verdict made its own facts about him, facts prison eagerly endorsed. The years to follow meant he no longer had to think about truth or lies anymore. What happened happened. And there wasn't enough truth in all the world to change it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“He'd resolved to keep his secrets from her, but seeing the fury in her eyes, he couldn't bear to lie to her face. Some part of him felt she'd experienced just as many lies as he had. And pain, whether sugared in falsities or tart with truth, was still pain.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“She didn't smile often but pursed her lips, seeming to almost protect herself from even the curl of a smirk. His memory felt her warmth but visualized the heat as an alertness, eyes watching, darting questioning, on guard for something a young Charlie hadn't endured enough yet to see. The truth of her fears revealed themselves in the way she gripped his arm when they crossed a street, in the hard honesty that would not allow him to be naive, in even the way she stuck kisses on his forehead that felt like punctuations. His recollection of childhood was blushed red with love, but understood that red as more a terror in focus. She feared everything because everything seemed coiled up to injure her son while in the simple activity of living life. Feared like he just dangled out there, naked, blind, and alone, prey to something he couldn't stop no matter how hard he tried.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“He remembered how strange the feeling was to love the eyes condemning him.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“But it isn't the world we have to remake, it's how we see ourselves in it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“White ain't a people. White is a spell they put on themselves. Losing they minds in it too much is probably what killed 'em. So there can't be a white colony, because white ain't an idea no more.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Belief is the first step on the path of being.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Anger, pride, sadness, respect, all rolling up into a word that again draped itself over his shoulders: father.
As a uniform, father slid under teacher. Under prisoner. Under, even, man. His heart raced as Sidney disappeared into the crowd. Father. Once on, that uniform would be impossible to take off whether or not Charlie had any business wearing it. Of all the things a man could be, this was different.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“That's all a family is: space to be odd.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Parenting isn't as much about them as it is about you. Don't matter who they are or who they want to be, you love and support them. Make space for it, understand? Not just raising them, but changing ourselves in the process. We spend too much time trying to wedge our children into something we think is right rather than following their lead. I don't want my child to carry what I carry, to feel what feel.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“At the cruising height, Charlie could see how little light still burned in the country below. So much of the land cloaked in darkness. All the space between cities and towns, connecting mountains to rivers, shore to shore. The darkness held America together. Looking down at a black immensity, Charlie saw the darkness as its own kind of beauty, experiencing for once the full shape of it, its beginning endless, its end ceaselessly moving. A form that held all the power of the universe and, without sound or grievance, gave every bit of that power all away. For once, Charlie admired the darkness down there and in himself until that deep black reached out, swallowed his eyes, and carried him off to sleep.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“You can't deny the truth of it: it's scary and it's unknown. That's a fact. But it's also a fact that scary and unknown is how everything has always been.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Mississippi is the shadow, the soul, and the skeleton closet of the nation. If America had ruins, Mississippi would be it. Every step you take got blood in the soil.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“So little life lived between the both of them. So few chances to spread themselves out across the canvas of just being. As he looked out at the road before them, he felt hope for all the life yet to be lived.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The things white folks put people through--my god, cruel in ways I just can't even reconcile. Should be ashamed for a thousand years for all the lynching and raping, using people like goddamn animals."

"Not all white people," Sidney added. "My mother wouldn't have been a part of this. She shouldn't've had to feel shame for something she didn't do."

"Shouldn't she?" Sailor cut eyes at Charlie and then in the rearview mirror at Sidney.
"Feeling what deserves to be felt is the only pathway to understanding. Let's get it straight: white folks did rape and steal and kill, and black folks died by the thousands--was dying all the way up 'til a year ago. Never feeling shame for that, and not allowing us to feel anger over it, means we don't evolve. We just go on repeating evil we can't understand. I'm sure your momma was a nice lady with a good heart, but her not feeling ashamed about all that happened is the same as not feeling anything at all.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The south has always been a monarchy in some form or another. Everybody thinks they're the king of something here. People, land business. That's why you'd hear them talk about their manors and their birthrights and societies all of them, carrying on like royals in court. having balls and cotillions while people was going off to war. Wouldn't be the first time some fool in Alabama claimed themselves lord of everything.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants