Sky Full of Elephants Quotes

“White isn't a race, it's an idea.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“I don’t believe there has ever been a more terrible weapon in this world than the word they.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Like her, all they knew, because all they'd been trained, was how well to suffer. And perhaps be rewarded by the consolation ot endurance. How does anyone begin to free themselves from the cycle of that type of conflict? Such struggle assumes an enemy one cannot punch or kick or kill. One that ravages memory and future alike. One no amount of apologies could satisfy. Conflict one lives with and tries, mightily, to live better than it demands.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“If healing our wounds breaks the world, then let it break.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The things white folks put people through--my god, cruel in ways I just can't even reconcile. Should be ashamed for a thousand years for all the lynching and raping, using people like goddamn animals."

"Not all white people," Sidney added. "My mother wouldn't have been a part of this. She shouldn't've had to feel shame for something she didn't do."

"Shouldn't she?" Sailor cut eyes at Charlie and then in the rearview mirror at Sidney.
"Feeling what deserves to be felt is the only pathway to understanding. Let's get it straight: white folks did rape and steal and kill, and black folks died by the thousands--was dying all the way up 'til a year ago. Never feeling shame for that, and not allowing us to feel anger over it, means we don't evolve. We just go on repeating evil we can't understand. I'm sure your momma was a nice lady with a good heart, but her not feeling ashamed about all that happened is the same as not feeling anything at all.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“All power on Earth was built around what it could exploit. It leveraged, burned, absorbed. stored, and monetized every ounce of what the natural world could produce. Even solar power tapped the one sun in the sky, all systems and studies based on the measurements of monetization. One way, one sun. And we were all blinded.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“I've always thought of it like a sky full of elephants," Herald said absently, as though he weren't speaking to Charlie but to different versions of himself. "It's up there, been up there, heavy too. All wisdom and memory… sorrow. A weight so heavy it would damn us all if it came down. But you can't see it 'til you see it. No matter how many times I tell you they're up there, you can't see 'em until you see 'em.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Young black boys, Charlie thought, the most marvelous beings in the universe. As nonchalantly as Herald bit into that fruit did black boys ever ponder their influence on the whole world. How effortlessly they rounded the shape of the earth with their swagger and illuminated its days with their creativity. Their hope, Charlie mused, offered even the bleakest parts of our planet a second sun.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“You're locked up here in your castle thinking we are all damned. But we're the lucky ones."

"Lucky how?"

"Lucky because the world has tried to destroy me in every kind of way, but I am still here. So are you. So are a lot of good people. Ain't no other people in the history of the world ever had so little of a serving of living as us. And now, we got all of it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“She longed for the shape of the rifle in her hand. How easily the gun made the world change the way she wanted.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The monument reminded everyone in the city that some of its residents used to be somebody’s property. A threat, Vivian understood, packaged as heritage.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“How do you mean?” “We finally inherited the earth and can’t remember who we was back when it was promised to us to begin with.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Your value is decided on all the things you are willing to accept about yourself. And what you won't.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“I ain't ever felt special my whole life."

"What did you feel?"

"Hard to explain. Felt like the opposite of special. Like a big black void moving through the world. Empty, if not for all the people trying to fill it with their own judgments on me."

"The thing about voids, Charlie Brunton, is ain't nothing inside of them but light they can't figure out how to free.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“We discovered there were other ways to live. When our time came to come back to America, we brought those ways with us. And, no, Mobile is not the paradise you imagine, at least not yet. But we came to learn paradise is the mind. What you believe about yourself. What you know about yourself. We have a lot of work to do, and we know it will never be perfect. But better is a direction. As long as we progress, together, we will be all right. Mobile is movement. We are all movement.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Mississippi is the shadow, the soul, and the skeleton closet of the nation. If America had ruins, Mississippi would be it. Every step you take got blood in the soil.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“You can't deny the truth of it: it's scary and it's unknown. That's a fact. But it's also a fact that scary and unknown is how everything has always been.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“White ain't a people. White is a spell they put on themselves. Losing they minds in it too much is probably what killed 'em. So there can't be a white colony, because white ain't an idea no more.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“But like the bulk of a mountain broken down by wind and water, truth devolves. With enough lies, one cannot defend himself with his own truth no more than stone can stop a river. So, what is a truth when fact is no longer accepted as true?
Charlie's courtroom verdict made its own facts about him, facts prison eagerly endorsed. The years to follow meant he no longer had to think about truth or lies anymore. What happened happened. And there wasn't enough truth in all the world to change it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“They did everything they could to stop our sun from shining. But I’m still here. A sun that just kept on rising.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, "Quarter-til," because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“That the world wasn’t ever equal. And the white folks who made it that way—the ones who fought, silent and spitting, to keep it that way—refused all responsibility for what it meant.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Go on,’ I say. ‘Go on and be,’ and I make the space for them to be. That means moving my own shit—baggage, fears, worries—out of their way. Our children won’t be like us, they will be better. So we can’t put our insecurities on them. Space and time. For you and for them.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“The world has already changed--yanked right out of the hands of anybody trying to go backward--be backward. It changed. Period and forever. What you're scared of is the burden of changing yourself along with it.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“I don't hate white people. I hate the whole world for letting what happened to us go on the way it did. You telling me hundreds of years of torture and couldn't nobody stop it? And ain't nobody want to rectify it? Hell yeah, damn right I'm mad and I'll be mad forever, until the day I die, and even then I want them to set my coffin on fire so I can be mad in the afterlife. Because what happened to our people deserves that kind of mad. And if won't nobody else feel it, I'll goddamn feel it enough for everybody. That's my liberation.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“She taught him how to see--further, wider, clearer. A good woman always does.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“How fucked up does that make me?"

"Doesn't make you fucked up at all. No more than anyone else put in fucked-up situations.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“I lived so many of my days mad," he said. "Mad at the sun, the stars, the sky, and everything they allowed to go on under their watch. I ain't mad no more. I forgive your mother, and Thomas, and all of them involved. And I forgive me. Because I can be filled with rage and grace at the same time.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“Because my past does not make the sum of me. I'm free to move on and let my life lessons put the wind behind the rest of my life.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“That's not crazy, Sidney. That's suffering. And suffering makes kin of all of us.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants