D.A. Gray > D.A.'s Quotes

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.”
― Thomas Merton

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.”
― Louise Erdrich, Tracks

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
― Charles Darwin

“Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.”
― Aeschylus, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

“Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.”
― Mary Oliver, Felicity

“Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“We sit close, but without touching; a thousand flickering
images pass through the screen. A hand stretches toward another,
stopping just short. A woman makes fists in front
of a pile of rubble, and though we can’t understand her words,
we know. Anyone who ever knew someone who’s lost knows.
Anyone not turned to piles of stone. Tonight, who has a right
to risk bringing life into this? The images shift—
flashing blue lights, twisted metal, the angry eyes
and stiff lips of fearful men, a Glock here, a Bushmaster
there, refugee fingers wrapped around chain link, and flags,
an abundance of flags. Mothers show premature
wrinkles without shame. Sirens lure the fearful men
into the rocks. Tonight, with effort, the hands find
each other. It’s the job before us, the not turning to stone.”
― D.A. Gray, Contested Terrain

“There's a traditional Kenyan prayer: "From the cowardice that dares not deal with new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truth, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver me.”
― Joni Rodgers, Bald in the Land of Big Hair: A True Story

“Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –

so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.”
― R.A. Salvatore

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“MAN: What’s the difference between “libertarian” and “anarchist,” exactly?

There’s no difference, really. I think they’re the same thing. But you see, “libertarian” has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what’s called “libertarianism” here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that’s always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Colors of spring have turned upside down.
Red once burned underfoot, now hangs over the horizon--a blood bruise where sky
smashed itself against hills. Green once gathered in the quick-shaping clouds carrying a mix of sand and rain and left quickly as it arrived; now it cushions your steps, hides the evidence of bones.”
― D.A. Gray, Contested Terrain

“Aubade to Langston"

When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother’s love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
begin to turn their engines toward
a deep past of knowing,
when all I want to do is burn
my masks, when I see a woman
walking down the street holding her mind
like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note
for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page,
when I see God’s eyes looking up at black folks
flying between moonlight & museum,
when I see a good-looking people
who are my truest poetry,
when I pick up this pencil like a flute
& blow myself away from my death,
I listen to you again beneath the mercy
of a blue morning’s grammar.

Originally published in the Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 49.3”
― Rachel Eliza Griffiths

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“You have the power to define yourself — remember that power; take that control. It’s like a superpower, really, to be whom you want to be, to do what you want to do, to fly where you want to fly. Your life will get more complicated, but think of it as a great adventure, every damn day. You’re going to have fun.”
― Randall Kenan

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I don't give a damn about geography, but I'll note that Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes abou the region.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia

“Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The implications of Bonhoeffer’s pairing of Jesus and culture were significant; Christians were virtually invisible in German society, absorbed into the German culture of Protestantism, with its liberal Christian language of human achievement and of nationalism. A good Christian looked no different than a patriotic German, tethered firmly to Volkish, or German-centered, loyalties.”
― Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance

“Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who are from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts, but brothers, not rivals, but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence...The difference... is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging.”
― Demosthenes

“Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“we never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.”
― Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita