Thrall Quotes

“I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Illumination

Always there is something more to know

what lingers at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination as in

this second-hand book full

of annotations daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them forever

meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

Here a passage underlined there

a single star on the page

as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

a tiny spark I follow

its coded message try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow It

is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

the little fires set

the flames of an idea licking the page

how knowledge burns Beyond

the exclamation point

its thin agreement angle of surprise

there are questions the word why

So much is left

untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the afterimage

of measured syntax always there

ghosting the margins that words

their black-lined authority

do not cross Even

as they rise up to meet us

the white page hovers beneath

silent incendiary waiting”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“the wages of empire is myopia”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“The yoke of my birth”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“That morning, awkward and heavy...”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“The servant, still a child, cranes
his neck, turns his face
up toward all of them. He is dark
as history, origin of the word
native: the weight of blood,
a pale mistress on his back,
heavier every year.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Artifact

As long as I can remember you kept the rifle--
your grandfather's, an antique, you called it--

in your study, propped against the tall shelves
that held your many books. Upright,

beside those hard-worn spins, it was another
backbone of your past, a remnant I studied

as if it might unlock-- like the skeleton key
its long body resembled--some door I had yet

to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet
as you described: spiraling through the bore

and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me
then: the rifle I'd inherited showing me

how one life is bound to another, that hardship
endures. For years I admired its slender profile,

until--late one night, somber with drink--you told me
it still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,

and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic
sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“the dark foil in this American story”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Here is the threshold I do not cross: a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo, the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Overhead, pelicans glide in threes--
their shadows across the sand
dark thoughts crossing the mind.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“What else to make
of the mind's slick confabulations?
What comes back
is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,
light filtered through water

closing over my head”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“He was not my father
though he might have been
I came to him
the mulatto son
of a slave woman
just that
as if it took only my mother
to make me
a mulatto
meaning
any white man
could be my father”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“At Wolf River my father is singing.
The sun is shining and there's a cooler
of Pabst in the shade. He is singing
and playing the guitar--the sad songs
I hide from each time: a man pining
for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead
on a slab at Saint James. I'm too young to know
this is foreshadowing.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“In this dream I am driving
a car, strapped to my seat

like Odysseus to the mast,
my father calling to me

from the back—luring me
to a past that never was. This

is the treachery of nostalgia.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“That year,

when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again
for my maid. Years later she told me
she'd say I was her daughter, and each time
strangers would stare in disbelief, then
empty the change from their pockets.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer
upon her, framed as she is in the painting's
romantic glow, her melancholic beauty
meant to show the pathos of her condition:
black blood--that she cannot transcend it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“we still know white from not.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“The boy is a palimpsest of paint--
layers of color, history rendering him

that precise shade of in-between.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“If not immanence,
the soul's bright anchor--blood passed from one
to the other--what knowledge haunts each body,
what history, what phantom ache? One man always
low, in a grave or on the ground, the other
up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,
the other a body in service, plundered.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall