Everything and Nothing at Once Quotes

“To be black is to be seen by everyone and no one at all.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“It is also a reminder for me to sit with the same idea: that things can be boring and don’t need to be anything other than what they are. And That ideology historically is different for Blackness than for anyone else, a people who, not by their own will and cognition, have made hustle and labor a staple of how to get ahead.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“To be soft, to be fragile as a Black man in this world, is not safe. So, when I look at my life, I can see and sense all the little ways the world has hurt me. And I can also see the little ways I’ve hurt myself, too.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Please. Write all the poems now. And often. Break them open with your teeth, with a pen. Take them from the pit of the stomach and shout them out, make them loud. Poetry will be our greatest soundtrack.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“That is life and that is living and that is beautiful. It is stillness. It is quiet and quite boring. I like it.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Black people, read books. We drink coffee and get the names of our professors; we show up late to class. We go shopping for water filters and shop at Ikea like everyone else. Far too often, our art and representations of us in the media don’t get to depict this. We don’t get to be normalized. We don’t get to be human… But my interest in what is boring has as much to do with the act of being as a form of rebellion and resistance as it does with the idea that we don't need an idea of what a state of being is to just be in the first place.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Afro-normalism speaks to our being as enough. There is so much pressure to go above and beyond, to be more than you were yesterday.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Afro-normalism (ahf-roe nörm/a-leišm): the art of capturing, depicting, and celebrating Black people doing things that are considered mundane and ordinary to the general public. e.g. - Black people fishing; Black people making tea; Black people reading comics; Black people living.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“It is all of those things and none of those things. Blackness is not a monolith—it is as nuanced, as different, and as bold as our hairstyles, our fashion choices, and our vernacular. It is the space between a comma and a bar, a breath taken or breaths strangled out of us.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Being Black, for me, has always been about everything and nothing at once, and the coded language in between.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Bet ya’ moms woulda twerked for MLK if he came down 138th and the Grand Concourse.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“The Black girl was never labeled as ‘hot’ or a catch. Sometimes, the Black girl wasn’t even on-screen. And when she was, she wasn’t the star, she wasn’t painted as desirable. I learned it but I didn’t know I was learning it. None of us did.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“To be Black, to be a Black man in the era I grew up in, was easily everything and nothing at once.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“Blackness is love, to me. To be loved is also very Black.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future

“There is almost always something at stake, something to live for and fight for.”
― Joel Leon, Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future