Dirty River Quotes

“I realize how much I have wanted this and not gotten it [good love], realize how much it is branded in my heart that, to be happy, alone, and childless is a fucking gift that most women get brainwashed into relinquishing.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“Sometimes surviving abuse isn't terrible. Sometimes, when you leave your whole life behind, it feels blissfully free. Stepping away from everything you've known. The bliss of your very first door that shuts all the way. Wind between your legs. Stopping everything that happened for seven generations.

Free. Free. Free.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“Everything in my family has taught me that it's safer to be a happy spinster than to try and love anybody. And, let's be real, when you look at the entire white colonialist capitalist ableist patriarchy, you don't see a whole lot that looks that great in terms of love and romance for surviving queer Black and brown femmes. Not a whole lot.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“And somewhere in that sweaty brown hot box of brown gay, I found myself.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“And maybe this is the story we need to write. If the story of surviving abuse, of being queer, isn’t about getting to normal as the end goal. Isn’t just sheets and towels and a long, quiet, Valium calm. Isn’t disaster and death and everything we ran from either. Isn’t anything we could’ve predicted, isn’t anything predictable. What comes after the disaster we keep surviving every day?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“But as much as I'll always have this place imprinted on me, little bits of grit rubbed into my plush skin ... I was also poised to to get out. I was always walking around with that hum in my hips, preparing for flight.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“I was happiest when I didn't have a body. I had been all body, all gender for a while. I needed some time off from having a body in order to figure out what kind of relationship I would have with one when I got back to it.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“For years I thought, a femme bottom – what is more common, what is more despised? Than a girl with her legs open. Wanting something. Just wanting. I didn't come up with this idea on my own. The whole world told me it was true. The whole world told me that there is nothing more common and stupid than someone feminine of center with their legs open, wanting something more than a kick or a curse.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“If ever since I was a kid, all I wanted was to be alone and happy with my own apartment with a door that locked, if all I could remember was the locked box, closed windows, pulled blinds, and trap of their marriage, how could I also dare to dream love? Being free was enough of a miracle.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“Me home, the weird older daughter, back in my room. Hanging out with my mother. Taking care of my mother. Bargaining for an evening out now and then. Still no driver's license. Never leaving. It would be like when I was sixteen, insisting that I was an adult, except that I wasn't, in some ways. Was I an adult? Or was I something else? Would I ever grow up?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“Sister, star. I want your light to be as big as mine and mine to be as big is yours. If I shine, it’s because of you. I want us both to.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“There's nothing like being young, brown, queer, in love, and completely insane.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“mama who I got away from when I was in New York I was finally away raw eighteen all hell has broken loose inside me don't go to bed before six a.m each night the whole year feel like I'm going crazy, I am crazy, I can't tell anybody, any school counselor, what the inside of my head feels like, it'll be Prozac Xanax it'll be back home failure not let me out again you got one ticket to ride, kid, don't blow it, the last thing I want is to be back in that house. If I get back in that house I'm never gonna be let out I'm gonna be some famous loser trapped fighting with her folks forever til they die. Everything feels like a TV program.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“I wasn't planning to have the big queer conversation with him. I was actually trying to have an awkward as hell conversation about me getting married to Rafael so I could stay in Canada. I figured in this way he would understand: we'd switched countries so many times in so many sketchy ways that it was almost a family tradition.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

“Whining songs of desire that curved my waist brown and sweet like tea, sour and salt like tamarind balls crusted with raw sugar.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home