Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Quotes

“When I think of my father, I think of my heart breaking in stages. A dull pain, then piercing. Electric. Still, somehow, gradual.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it's familiar. A drill that's a scream until it's a drill. Sometimes it's nothing more than piecing together the ways in which our hearts have all broken over the same moments, but in different places. But that's romantic. Sometimes it's realer than that.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“If my mother gave me language, my father gave me magic.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don't show up dead. So long as they stay missing.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Sometimes we choose what to believe, sometimes we know it.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“You ever sit in the car, or in a window seat on the subway, and the car or train next to you starts to move? And you think you're the one moving? And you'd swear by it? And sometimes, in your stomach, you can even feel it? That. I say. That's what life's like now.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“There are thousands of ways to love men, Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, and when I watch my brothers button their shirts, or body slam my niece, or dance with their lips puckered, I think I know all of them.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“His eyes are wet and wide in that orange glow of night-road, that perfect combination of street lamp and moonlight that casts a terrific sadness, or wildness, on any space in its spell.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Here is a Hawaiian legend once told to me: Sometimes the dead don't want to be dead. Sometimes souls go flitting around in the air, particles of light, drifting, until a mortal crams the soul back inside its bod. The kino wailua, or spirits, can be spotted anywhere, the face of a rock, a mountainside - a Hawaiian should always look for facial features. It is the mortal's job to perform the kapuku, or resuscitation process. It is our duty to sneak the soul beneath the toenail of a body, let the body rise up like a newly watered plant.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“These hushed years. These secrets of the body. To whom did they belong first. I want to find where it began and say, I'm here now, listening. I want to reach through the years and tell the women I've been lonely.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“But that mother-daughter thing—I believe in it now. It’s something that can spool out forever like a string between two cups. A thread that will hum when you need it.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“If there are real men, I haven't met them yet.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“My eyes sting. I am used to this by now, used to knowing that I will never be used to this---that this part of her will never not break me, that this may be the rest of our lives. The two of us here, in this house, waiting for my father. The chicken.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“I never hated their mother with any purpose - I never even knew her. I hated her because there were two mothers and only one father.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“There are so many people I've never quit missing.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive. What I wanted was my freckled cheeks printed on cheap paper, stapled at the ears, the flyers torn from telephone poles and the scales of palm trees, a sliver of my face left flapping in the wind. I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone. I wanted limbs dangling from the lip of a trash compactor, found by a lone jogger who would cry at the sight of my ankles, my beaten blue knees with their warm fuzz of kiddie hair. Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don’t show up dead. So long as they stay missing.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Fucking Chink, says the boy, though my mother does not know what this means, and her parents do not tell her. They called me that, too, I tell her now. Growing up. My mother laughs. Of course they did. Almost thirty years, and they can’t think of something better.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it’s familiar. A drill that’s a scream until it’s a drill. Sometimes it’s nothing more than piecing together the ways in which our hearts have all broken over the same moments, but in different places. But that’s romantic. Sometimes it’s realer than that.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“I can do things like that when I write—pluck any thread of want and weave a whole world.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“I feel it in my throat first. The tight knot that always unfurls itself into a shakiness all over my face. From there I can never stop the tears from coming, and I hate myself for it. I slam my fists into the mattress.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“I sit down next to my dead father. No one prepares you for the dreams. I want to breathe in the shoulder of his shirt. I want to breathe in the shoulder of your shirt, I say, but I can’t remember it right. It’s all gone now, I say. The house. The details. He lights a cigarette. My father is never sick in my dreams. He is not plugged into tubes; he has no oxygen mask. Here, we are both breathing. What’s missing is always there, he says. He taps the center of my forehead three times. Relax, he says. There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“One man always asks me questions about riding my horses and how that must feel. To tame something so wild and dangerous, like a gun loaded right between my legs.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“She stares right through me and says, What kind of person will you be?”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“When I think of my father, I think of my heart breaking in stages. A dull pain, then piercing. Electric. Still, somehow, gradual. The way his legs look in this swimming pool today—that’s the first stage of my grief. Even the blue bloat of water doesn’t make them look any stronger, or more capable, than a child’s.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls