Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Quotes

“Life has so many tuneless days... what better posture to take than to become a whimsical motherfucker?”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“He utterly honored his sorrow, gave in to it with such deep and boundless weeping that it seemed as I stood there he was the bravest man I had ever known.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Our minds are intricate. Our desires are complex. We are gorgeously contradictory in our epistemologies. We were not invented yesterday. Kathleen”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature; and a colored woman with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine is an almost nonexistent species.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“We needed to be autodidacts; we needed to pass books from hand to hand; we needed to search, and thus be inspired by hard-won effort to create ourselves. We needed to understand that there is power in searching and finding and not having things handed to us.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“...later she would laugh when she discovered that meaninglessness came from the dark shaft of gloom that surrounded her day and night, and that ecstasy was just a sunny room away.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“I don't know how you survived! I've been all over this bloody country and I swear to God, I don't know how you survived! This place is a million godforsaken times worse than South Africa! Christ, man, apartheid puts holes in our dignity but it leaves us our culture, man! We've still got our lifeline, our traditions... Christ Almighty, man, they didn't leave you a bloody thing! Not a bloody thing!”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Oh my God, you thought, how life will take them apart, untangle them when they should be allowed to stay as they are, stay so deeply entwined, full of faith only in each other--oh, they should stay like that forever.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“It was only sunlight she needed. Pure, delicious sunlight flooding through a room.)”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“He rode home with her to New Jersey and she took him into the backyard to look at her father’s roses . . . to look at her childhood, to look at what pricked and stung and was difficult to forgive. He looked at the house and the yard and her family . . . And it seemed to her that everything changed. Was forgiven. The”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“He remembers everything. He has a perfect smell for death and pain, the thousand and one slights that have colored his life, the happiness snatched before he could taste it. He perseveres and remembers.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Louise lives on excellent terms with her solitude.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Is it possible to imagine any greater amputation, any greater karmic debt, than reincarnation as a Negro?”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“To be so nurtured; to know day after day only comfort, love; to feel your home a happy place where joy and justice meet--this has always seemed to me the greatest gift imaginable.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“The South must be a terrible place.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“And every Wednesday at five o'clock she sat for an hour and unburdened herself on a very sleepy psychiatrist, whose continual dozing was a sure sign that not only was she boring, but that any life dissected too closely was boring and could only make you fall asleep.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“It is a time that calls forth the most picturesque of metaphors, for we are swimming along in the mythical underbelly of America ... there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“It's 1963: we're in the year of prophetic fulfillment. The last revival meeting is at hand, where the sons took up the cross of the fathers. White sons went forth to the dirt roads of Georgia and Alabama to prove to their fathers that the melting pot could still melt. "Negro" sons went forth to the Woolworths and Grants and Greyhounds of America to prove to their fathers that they could eat and sit and ride as well in the front as in the back, as well seated as standing.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“... then came a period when nothing soothed me ... there was no balm in the festive herbal splendor of my kitchen, no balm in the exhaustive evening showers before and after the Brooklyn Bridge excursion ... the waking hours weighted themselves between my legs, and there was no relief in sight .. I took to the reading of memoirs ... it was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude ...”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“I was never a pleasure to have around ... too moody ... an intimidating nuisance flyleafing his way across time on a whim, any old whim ...”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“She could feel her skin turning darker while he lay there and stared at her; her hair felt not only short but unbelievably bushy.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“any life dissected too closely was boring and could only make you fall asleep.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“They will pass the winter in this desultory fashion. The”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“I hate fights … fights and working both make me sick.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?