Kate > Kate's Quotes

“Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Listen, baby, it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage is a privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian,”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can't, it's like we're afraid we'll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don't want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine's the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“That dance is your prayer. So don't rush it, and don't dance how you practice. there's only one way for an Indian man to express himself. It's that dance that comes from all the way back there. All the way over there. You learn that dance to keep it, to use it. Whatever you got going on in your life, you don't leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. Any other way you try to say what you really mean, it's just gonna make you cry. Don't act like you don't cry. That what we do. Indian men. We're crybabies. You know it. But not out there.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a native son

“The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not known, and the man they had not known may have been the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered now.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“What he didn't say was that you don't get cold-resistant because your jackets suck, you just stop complaining about it after a while, because complaining doesn't make you any warmer.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians