Colored Television Quotes

“The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jane's father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn't want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That's what white people didn't understand. Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She'd had her own childhood of moments just like this. She too had parents who were over-educated and underpaid - it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggest class and privilege without actual class and privilege - gauche caviar without the actual caviar.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jujubean is gonna probably marry a white guy, and her kids will marry white people and I’ll end up with some Abercrombie & Fitch motherfuckers for grandkids. It’ll be a Quincy Jones Christmas extravaganza. I’m paying fifty-fucking-thousand dollars a year for my own extinction. If that ain’t some volunteer slavery, what is?”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jane had no urge to return to the East Coast, not anymore - but on days like this, she did miss it, the drama of the seasons, the changing mood ring of the sky, even the statues of old white men, something solid she could rail against.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Also, camping trips seemed like an elaborate excuse to buy expensive equipment you didn’t need—a flagrant display of upper-middle-class white privilege so that you could pretend to live simply.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“The obstacle is the path.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Jane’s father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn’t want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“people don’t realize that the thing that separates real artists from wannabes is real ones finish what they started. Persistence. Commitment to a work nobody seems to want or need until you show them what it was they were missing. Like with my students, it’s always how I can separate the wheat from the chaff, you know? There are some students who work with a relentlessness, an urgency, and cannot be swayed from finishing a piece. And there are others, some of the most talented ones, who are just doing it for the praise. And you sort of know they’re not going to be artists, not in the real sense. They’re going to give up, go into graphic design or advertising or whatever. Real artists are relentless.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“A therapist had once told her that if she had a baby she was going to have to lower her standards. Otherwise, she’d be the only person she felt was good enough to care for her child, and her husband would get away with not helping at all. If you lowered your standards, the therapist told her, you would end up with a coparent who did some things very badly but some things well—and your kids would be better off because they’d have two parents who weren’t resentful and overburdened. The same could be said about sitters. You had to lower your standards, or you’d never get away and replenish yourself.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She didn’t get the appeal of going off the grid. Nothing of interest happened off the grid, and if something of note did happen, it usually involved things best left to the pages of a glossy children’s book—a grizzly bear or a mountain lion or a rattlesnake. Or a serial killer. Also, camping trips seemed like an elaborate excuse to buy expensive equipment you didn’t need—a flagrant display of upper-middle-class white privilege so that you could pretend to live simply.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“There’s a difference,” Dennis used to say, “between a story and a situation. And what you have is a situation. It still needs a story.” Or “Without an inciting incident, there is no story.” Or “A novel begins with a character in a stable but flawed life—an unhappy marriage, a dead-end job. The novel hinges on the inciting incident—something to destabilize your character’s life in the first thirty pages.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“class and privilege without actual class and privilege—gauche caviar without the actual caviar.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid—it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Do you think our luck is changing?” “I don’t believe in luck. I believe in resilience. As an artist, you have to be resilient above all else.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to your sticking with it.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Every generation must leave an impression. And it had to keep pressing into the group ahead of it until the impression was made permanent. Then a fresh generation would be born and look around, bewildered, at their elders and assert some newfangled idea that years from now would make perfect sense.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Like most people, Jane considered her generation superior to those that came after. But sometimes, driving away from the college, she would remember herself at her students’ age and think that she had not been so unlike them. Because her bratty students were, she knew, almost always right. And the point of young people was to be annoying about the truth they saw until it became evident to people like herself.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“What world do you write about?” Jane liked his question. What world? He was clearly somebody who understood how this worked.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Wasn’t it ironic, she said, how women spent their twenties trying to catch a man and have his babies, then spent the next decade wishing they could escape through a bathtub drain? Settling down was just a euphemism for inching toward death. Death was the ultimate form of settling down. She said Jane should pine to create great art instead because, in the end, men were letdowns and kids were disappointments who grew up—like Jane and her sister—to blame their mothers for everything. Only art and friendship remained.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“To the Huntington Botanical Gardens, for the space and silence to work.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Money—real money—was what they needed now. It would finish the story. It would give meaning to all the struggle of the past ten years. And money would give Lenny the time and space he needed to make his art. The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts. Money would grant her the help and the home she needed to raise her children and to do what she wanted to do, which was to tell stories—and age richly. That too.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“And their children, and their different ways of loving them—hers with fear, Lenny’s with his steely masculine confidence that all was well. They had nearly died under the weight of that love. Because having children, she thought, was like a suicide pact.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Novel writing was too much. It was such a relief to dispense with the tangle of language—all those heavy blocks of prose she’d had to wade through to world build as they called it in workshop. Novel writing was too many different jobs under the title of one. You had to be all the actors, like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. You had to be the character of the mother, the father, the son, and the daughter, the mailman, the dog, the murderer, and the victim. But it was worse even than that. Because you also had to be the set designer, the set builder, the gaffer, the lighting man. You had to make it rain and make the sun come out, describing every change in the weather so the reader could smell and feel it. And the only tool they gave you to do all this labor was language.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She’d always disliked the Buddhist saying, “The obstacle is the path.” Or maybe it was that she hated the people who said it, smiling tightly as she pushed deeper into Downward Dog.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“You mean Stepin Fetchit?” he said. And she’d snorted, pretended to think it was funny and let it go. Because marriage was all about letting those little moments go.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Like any Black Gen Xer, she hadn’t had time to worry about microaggressions, what with all the good old-fashioned macroaggressions she’d experienced: white kids throwing rocks at her head, white kids calling her father “nigger” with impunity, white kids leaving bananas on her family’s porch when they moved into the neighborhood.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“Still, Jane didn’t think Lilith had done so badly in the game of life. Which meant that Jane’s karma, if not quite clean, was drinkable.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“The public school teachers, they tried to break me,” he said. “From the moment I started school they tried to crush my spirit. They tried to shame me and pathologize me. An army of white women, sometimes men, who literally thought it was their job to destroy Black boys. They sent me to the principal’s office every day for no reason except I couldn’t sit on my own little square on the carpet. I was always trying to mess with other kids. Normal little boy hijinks, you know? Pulling this girl’s hair, giving that boy a wedgie. Nothing criminal. But when you’re a little Black boy, that’s what they do. They try to find a way to pathologize your ordinary fucking behavior. To get you in that pipeline. They really want to put you onto that track, you know, a life working at McDonald’s or hard crime. Your pick. And I think that’s what made me Hampton Motherfucking Ford. All that time spent in the principal’s office and detention. That’s where I discovered the fire that was inside me. The hunger to be, to persevere. I thought, I’m going to make sure these white people regret the day they ever tried to doubt me.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“She couldn’t imagine where he’d go. It was after eight. There was nowhere to go in LA after eight unless you planned it a week in advance. It wasn’t like you could drive down the mountain and wander into some party or bar scene.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television