Tricia Maina > Tricia Maina's Quotes

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Is heaven also made in Taiwan? And does Jesus really know how to speak Samoan?”
― Sia Figiel, The Girl in the Moon Circle

“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Trying to reason with whiteness is akin to reasoning with a clinical narcissist who refuses to go to therapy: frustratingly impossible because the untreated narcissist simply does not have the requisite tools to see themselves as anything other than “good,”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This is how whiteness reasserts itself: through a white feminist movement that aligns itself with diversity and inclusion to get white women through the door but then slams it shut in brown and black women’s faces.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Those tears may well be genuine, but that does not make them innocent and harmless: the opposite in fact.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“And so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality, sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant no longer being regarded as a “woman.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Unlike the second languages I attempted to learn in high school, there are Korean words I inherently understand without ever having learned their definition. There is no momentary translation that mediates the transition from one language to another. Parts of Korean just exist somewhere as part of my psyche--words imbued with their pure meaning, not their English substitutes.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“everything I might regret. She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I know people not from here probably don’t understand our feeling for these hills. Our love for land not spectacular. Our mountains are not like Western ones, those jagged awesome ones, your eyes always pulled to their tops. But that is the difference, I decided. In the West, the mountains are mostly horizon. We live in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.”
― Ann Pancake, Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“I AM THE SHADOW THAT DEVOURS ROCKS, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“Pussy, it's the breakfast of champions.”
― Chloë Brushwood Rose, Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
― Toni Cade Bambara , The Salt Eaters