Robin > Robin's Quotes

“Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and a cultural worker. It's one the mainstream doesn't often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age 98.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“And this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

“Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones were born with, tucked behind your liver.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

“This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Like the Roman fringe or the nocturnal plait, sweat is a sign. Of what? Of moral feeling. Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The saint is first and foremost a being without formal context; the idea of fashion is antipathetic to the idea of sainthood.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“And yet, nothing can escape being put into question by History; not even good writing.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The DSM, and medical discourse in general, are not the only entities governing the operation of mental disabilities in university culture. We, academics, are also governing ourselves.”
― Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

“If academics have an ethical responsibility to respond to occasions of "shared moments of horror", as Borrowman suggests, then what is our responsibility to the unshared experience of mental disability as felt and known by neuroatypical subjects?”
― Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

“She attended class, but she brought a bowl of ice cream.”
― Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

“Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You looking good."
"Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“The woman in me cannot be researched.”
― féi hernandez, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

“How do you tire a spirit? Call it names, tell it what to wear, how to act, how to walk, how to sit, how to carry its books, what to say, when to speak, when not to speak.”
― MJ Jones

“To live in authenticity does something to a person.”
― MJ Jones

“The dress code of "business casual" is highly gendered, and I have to decide which "drag" to wear to work.”
― Sand C. Chang, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

“We are dreaming things that a previous generation never imagined, but those dreams are sometimes night terrors too, frustrated visions of our oppression.”
― S.E. Smith, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

“Douglass's story reminds us that names are things we use, as well as things that others use to grasp and hold on to a sense of us. Names don't spring forth fully formed from the platonic ideal of our identities. Names are social technologies, built and negotiated through extensive social systems.”
― Dan Bouk, Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

“The decisions the census informed -- in war or peace -- could not overcome the limits of the society the data described. Democracy's data is only as good as the democracy it serves.”
― Dan Bouk, Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

“When nonviolent deviant individuals are labeled as sick, however, the public tends to view them as if they were violent. The community is also likely to restrict them in the same harsh way as those who are violent.”
― Seymour Halleck, Politics of Therapy

“They are not talking about a bloodless, planned, goal-oriented revolution, but about a violent, chaotic one. It is here that I part company with them. I am not convinced that an overpopulated, unhappy world in which a umber of nations have the weapons with which to destroy all mankind can tolerate much more violence.”
― Seymour Halleck, Politics of Therapy

“So much information is now available to all that even unsophisticated people can easily detect inconsistencies in government policies and glaring inadequacies in the teachings of many of our institutions. We have greater doubts about the truthfulness and strength of our leaders, and we no longer take for granted the standards of conduct set by our churches, our universities, and even our laws. Thus, the information explosion has helped to weaken older value systems, but as yet no new systems have replaced the old.”
― Seymour Halleck, Politics of Therapy

“I am not a trained historian, but I am, like many people, someone who remembers and fights to remember as an act of both resistance and changing the future.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice