BAM > BAM's Quotes

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

“There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to see it.
There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to be it.”
― Amanda Gorman

“If we're to live up to our own time,
then victory won't lie in the blade.
But in all the bridges we've made,
that is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb.
If only we dare.
It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it's the past we step into
and how we repair it.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff.

This is the first world, and the last.”
― Joy Harjo

“Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.”
― Joy Harjo, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years

“You are a story fed by generations
You carry songs of grief, triumph
Loss and joy
Feel their power as they ascend
Within you
As you walk, run swiftly, even fly Into infinite possibilities

Let go that which burdens you
Let go any acts of unkindness or brutality
From or against you
Let go that which has burdened your family
Your community, your nation Or disturbed your soul
Let go one breath into another

Pray thankfulness for this Earth we are
For this becoming we are
For this sunlight touching skin we are
For the cooling of the dark we are

Listen now as Earth sheds her skin
Listen as generations move
One against the other to make power
We are bringing in a new story

We will be accompanied by ancient songs
And will celebrate together

Breathe this new dawn
Assist it as it opens its mouth
To sing.”
― Joy Harjo

“Pass this love on, he'd say.
It knows how to bend and will never break.
It's the only thing with a give and take,
The more it's used the more it makes.

That love is the bridge that will cross the river home.
He'd be standing in the dark with no one listening.
How time blows steadily through the city, the trees.
Sing to this earth, sing, he sang.”
― Joy Harjo

“Perhaps it was a weakness,” I said, “or, as Leo Tolstoy says somewhere, the lack of a necessary weakness.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Doesn’t it make you shudder to think that the heart of the universe is so cold?”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“This was not true, but the lie seemed to happen ahead of me, without my full consent. This too was to become a habit. It is far too tempting, when you are away from home, to make stuff up.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“A thousand and one things could befall us and the people we love the most would have no hint of it.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“God veil our faults," as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, "God erase our faults," Now that would've been ambitious. But "veil" is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and certainly no one is innocent. Not even you and I.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“How strange, she thought, that there is no word in English for "injustice," for example, that a state of injustice is, to that language, merely the opposite or absence of justice. Whereas the Arabic thulm, which shares its root with thalam, or "darkness," is far more profound. I agreed. And, she went on, there is no word for fu'aad either. The dictionary has it as "heart." But fu'aad is not heart, but an in-between space, the correspondence or communication between the heart, the spirit, and the mind, and therefore it relates not to human anatomy but rather to metaphysics. How the English language can do without such a word, she said, is unfathomable. She also found that the genderless nature of English renders the nouns "antiseptic," that was the word she used, dispossessing inanimate objects of character. When I disagreed, she said, "I would be lost if the moon and sun had no gender.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“My ideal man," Malak said ponderingly. "I'm not sure what that means. I don't want the ideal. I want complexity. I want passion. I want imperfection.

"My ideal man is not ideal. But," she said, leaning forward, "I'll tell you about him."

"I want him to have lunch at home. I want him to help me with my own mind. I want him to be bookish, wise, cunning, and exemplary. I want him to be a good storyteller, and always on my side."

"Yes, I want him to be near me. A good conversationalist, proud, not afraid of the lofty heights."

"I want him to be a singer, one who knows and loves a good song, can play an instrument, the oud or the ney, and preferably both. I want him to be a good mourner, know how to attend to the pain of others, a consoler who could assuage the grief I have for all those I loved and befriended and who are no longer here. I want him to be a healer, an expert in all that troubles me. I want him to be a fire that annihilates all danger that lies ahead and behind me and that which I have, somehow, without his help, found a way to avoid. I want him to be faithful---"

"Incapable of deception. I want him to be constant__"

"Constant in his love and in his prayers and, when those prayers are not answered, I want him to change reality with his own hands. I want him to be my lord-"

"For all the world to see. I want him to make me proud, to make vanish old and fresh longings, new and unremembered regrets. I want him to be vigilant-"

"To protect me from sorrows even once their great heights have passed. I want him to know how to deal with the past. I want him to be occasionally gripped by fear-"

"The fear of losing me. I want him to be patient, to help me to endure the injustices visited upon the houses of those I love. But I also want him to be impatient-"

"To lose all reason and hurry off, forgetting his shoes and hat, and ride-"

"His horse flanked by wings of angry dust, galloping, if need be, all night to find the traitorous, to change my fortunes and avenge me."

"And then I want him to return to me, to prosper by my side. I want to take him to the clearest stream, one only I know the way to, and there quench his thirst. I want him to look at me sometimes as if he does not know who I am. But I want to be forever recognized by him, come what may, to point me out in a crowd when, after the passage, we are reunited."


"I want him to see me when I cannot see myself.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond. How does one finish the sentence: 'It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …'
Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one “tence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.
Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours.
What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“To orient oneself in relation to this kind of equivocation as it exists in the West—where a genocide is a conflict of equals, and really who’s to say what a sufficient number of dead civilians is, and it’s all so complicated anyway—is to temporarily forget that most of the world sees this for what it is right now. This mandatory waiting period, in which the rest of the planet politely pleads with the West’s power centers to bridge the gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This