Ali > Ali's Quotes

“I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir

“The hipster contingent has taken over a lot of the commercial streets, and now you can't go two blocks without running into some up-its-own-ass artisanal shop with a name that's just two random nouns thrown together with an ampersand. Satchel & Dove. Twig & Petal. Those are the places where you find out there's such a thing as boutique tarragon mayonnaise and that a baby onesie can legitimately cost sixty dollars. (p.169)”
― Una LaMarche, Like No Other

“I keep my chin tucked in, eyes on the ground, the same stance I have when I pass by the guys from my neighborhood who laugh and call me Urkel because I wear a big backpack and don't hang out on the street all night smoking Kool XLs--and by the way, we need a new black nerd archetype; also, when are these wannabe gangstas watching reruns of Family Matters?”
― Una LaMarche, Like No Other

“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“These dogs didn't bother to bond with us, but stuck out their paws, not to shake hands but so we could slit their wrists and get it the hell over with. (p.51)”
― Stephanie Powell Watts, We Are Taking Only What We Need

“It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city's only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city's only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: 'Truth or Vengeance', as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." - reference to Andy Warhol”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids