Representation Quotes

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.”
― Jane Espenson

“Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.

And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
― Freidrich Neitzsche

“If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“It is not surprising that young white males – most between thirty and forty – play major roles in the production of hip-pop. It’s easy to forget this because when most people critique rap and hip-pop harshly, they assume that young black men are the sole creators and producers of misogynist rap. In fact, nothing is unilaterally produced anymore. As we’ve discussed, once you have a corporate takeover of the street culture, it is no longer the property of the young, Black and Latino men and women who have created it. It is reinvented with the mass consumer audience in mind. The hard-core misogyny and the hard-core sexism isn’t a translation from street to big-time studio, it is a product of the big-time studio.”
― bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.”
― Paul Haggis

“History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“It is more substantial to represent a purpose, rather than just a title.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.”
― Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World

“One of the Christian's biggest fears is appearing 'too Christian'. God forbid, because that's often characterized as god-awful! We want to be one, but without being 'one of them'.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.”
― Michael Copperman

“I just like to say I'm from London, I don't have any specific area I represent. I'm not representing for a small group of people. I'd like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody's a bit nerdy. I'm more interested in that than in where they're from. I'm more interested in what people do.”
― Craig Taylor

“—Mais, quelle que soit l'importance de l'événement, dès qu'il est écrit sur le papier, il ne fait plus qu'une ou deux lignes. "Mes yeux ne voyaient plus" ou "je n'avais plus un sou", il suffit d'une dizaine ou d'une vingtaine de lettres de l'alphabet. C'est pourquoi, quand on calligraphie des autobiographies, il arrive qu'on soit soulagé. On se dit que ce n'est pas la peine de trop réfléchir à tout ce qui se passe dans le monde.”
― Yoko Ogawa, Les Tendres plaintes

“I wanted to read a story like mine, because I wanted to know how that story would end.”
― Zoë Bossiere, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir

“We may have to bring along our Unionist friends by considering less radical, federal solutions on the longer road to full independence. The movement has been derailed by many other things besides identity politics: cowardice, personality cult, unwise alliances, middle-management over-reach, a bureaucratic, form-obsessed culture of mutual distrust, self-imposed busy-work, Holyrood bubbles and Westminster troughers. It will be righted on its tracks as soon as we can remember that we can also build movements without the politicians and institutions that currently divide us through increasingly morbid and inward-looking agendas. Until they can be trusted to represent us again, it may be time for artists to wean themselves off institutional support, at least where they can, through the direct engagement of audiences, readers and students that the digital age offers, and through private sponsorship and investment.”
― Don Paterson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“Neither was Amber an “everywoman.” She was a Hollywood celebrity with money, an armored truck and driver, a revolving door of lawyers, PR wizards, and media connections at the ready. Her existence was totally alien from the day-to-day lives of most domestic-violence victims. This doesn’t mean she couldn’t also be a victim of abuse—but she wasn’t a stand-in for other survivors. Society tends to use celebrities as vessels to carry every social examination, every social problem, every social ill. But celebrities aren’t the norm they aren’t representative of anything except celebrity.

Amber said time and time again that she chose to speak up about Johnny’s abuse for those who don’t have a voice. But Amber hadn’t assumed a central role in the #MeToo movement on her own; she was aided and encouraged by powerful institutions like the ACLU and the Washington Post, which viewed her as an apt representative for the latest cause célèbre, betraying their own detachment from everyday victims. Throughout the trial and its aftermath, many sectors of the media held the line on this narrative, trumpeting Amber as a martyr for the movement and selling her experience as exemplary and relatable. In their analyses of the trial as a systemic failure and “the death of #MeToo,” they failed to see their own complicity in constructing a myopic, unrelatable notion of social justice.”
― Kelly Loudenberg, Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

“In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity — to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care about their own neighbors. They find themselves isolated from the life of their community and their nation, driven by social forces beyond their control into little individual worlds in which their own individual objectives have become paramount to the collective good. Social objectives, social welfare, the good of the nation, the democratic way of life — all these have become nebulous, meaningless, sterile phrases.

This course of urban anonymity, of individual divorce from the general social life, erodes the foundations of democracy. For although we profess to be citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them that they do not “count.” They have no voice of their own, no organization (really their own instead of absentee) to represent them, no way in which they may lay their hand or their heart to the shaping of their own destinies.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“To be a minority is not only to live on the margins. It is to remind the center that the narrative is incomplete.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“Every constitution, then, every law naturally expires at the end of 19 years...If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right...

The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one that needs repeal...”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

“The pistachio rose white chocolate bar was meant to represent Adeena's Pakistani background while the Mexican hot chocolate bar was for Elena's Mexican heritage (shocker). I wanted something simple and decadent for my Filipino chocolate representation, so Hana created white chocolate and milk chocolate versions of ube truffles. The subtle earthy vanilla tones of the purple yam paired well with both types of chocolate, and the beautiful violet color drew your eyes to the small spheres.”
― Mia P. Manansala, Death and Dinuguan

“Storytelling isn’t a luxury. It’s how we decide who gets to be human.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Your name is your story — wear it with pride.”
― Uchenna Azonobi, My Name Is Who I Am