Do You Remember Being Born? Quotes

“Two years passed. It was not a time that felt particularly slow or particularly fast. It was, however, the time in your life when you most vividly experienced life's elapsing. The sense that your life was wearing through. Not that death was coming nearer but that the progress of your life would continue at a speed and with a permanence you were not prepared for.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Naps have always seemed like a luxury I can’t afford.” Rhoda put her hands back on the wheel. “I get it,” she said. “I used to think that way. Get your lazy butt back to work. More hours, more clients. I couldn’t stop. My daughter’s like that too. But that’s capitalism, Marian. I try to tell her: ‘That’s the powers that be.’ They want to squeeze every minute of labor out of you. They want you to think your only value is your work. That anything else is laziness. But it isn’t laziness: it’s resistance.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“The Nap Ministry was founded by Tricia Hersey in 2016 and I highly recommend her 2022 book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required me to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we think; we cannot really see who we are. Here, on Sunday in San Francisco, I had the same impression: that I might unfasten the locks and lower the draw-bridge; that I might not be a fortress but a space for others to pass through.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“What is most important—what is hardest and also most important—is to be natural. Humans have a difficult time with “natural." We are better at "interesting" or "beautiful" or "forceful" than we are at "natural." Everything is an exertion, everything is performance. One of the reasons I have lived on Christopher Street for as long as I have is that I know how to be natural there. I can sit at the table. I can cook an egg. And once you have found the way to be natural, the rest of what's important can be layered over top: lucidity, beauty, force.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“A poem-shaped space, I thought. A poem-shaped space. I tried to hold a poem-shaped space in my mind. Sometimes the work of life is like preparing a bedroom for a guest: sweeping the floor, emptying the ash-tray, watering the sloping aloe plant. Opening the window wide to let new air in. I did all this inside my head, behind my eyes, while my fingers made words appear and waited for that guest to arrive.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“I opened my eyes: soft light, morning, cool. The shimmer of a dream as it departed. I have always enjoyed waking up to different weather, as if the world's been up to something in the night.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Art is husbandry, I thought. It is an experiment in imaginary kinship. Bring together this mare and this stallion; this marriage and this moon; this sun and this daughter. Poems, paintings, pop songs, choreographies-all are collisions of associations, associations deliberately and also unforeseeably formed. One attempts to manage the consequences. To mitigate the damage. I know that ''moon'' evokes roundness, whiteness, coolness, night. I might not know the way it reminds you of orchids, or miscarriage, or of Victoria, British Columbia. But no, perhaps I could predict orchids. Perhaps ''orchids'' and ''moon'' seem to vibrate on the same frequency to me too, something ineffable and strong. So perhaps I put them in a poem together. Perhaps I put ''roundness'' and ''whiteness'' and ''orchids'' in a poem together, omitting ''moon." Perhaps I let these gravities work on one another, an invisible web catching meanings in it. All of this, any of this: perhaps. I may choose any word to place beside the preceding word; a painter may choose any stroke. I test the water for salinity. I listen for what goes bump with the night.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?