No Ashes in the Fire Quotes

“No more ashes. No more fires. Only love. And the unbridled urgency to build a world where the edges are imagined as the starting place for black liberation now and always.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Americans travel so quickly to the edge of our love, I thought. We police the borders of care, and black people know very well what it feels like to always be omitted from the democratic concern centered on white peoples, and to occupy a position of dereliction.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“thought that acknowledging my errors was the ultimate goal, but naming my wrongs is not the same as working hard to undo them.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Too few are asking us the questions to get to the depths of black queer boys' traumas. What is it that you desire but have been denied? What is that you need to feel safe? How do you actually feel about the person you had sex with? What is it about him you desire? What are the sources of your pain? Who hurt you? Who first told you that your sexual desires and attractions were wrong? Does it feel better when you use a condom? Do you feel more connected when you don't use a condom at all? What is it about that particular connection that fulfills you? To ask those questions would mean black boys and men would have to be seen, first, as bleeding, crying, vulnerable and sometimes resilient human persons. We are breakable...Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“During my late adolescence, never once did a doctor ask me, while administering an HIV test, if I experienced love or rejection, connection or estrangement. It didn't matter that Billy was beautiful and kind...Humans feel, but subjects report.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Loving oneself and being loved while navigating the violence that harms black people’s psyches and well-being is a survival tactic that requires work. Staying alive when you’ve been counted dead is love.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“There are no perfect words to describe what happens when the spirit is so depleted it no longer feels any sting, when the mind is so overcome by thoughts the person can no longer distinguish reality from fiction, when all words of encouragement offered to lift you go unheard when spoke.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Writing about it now feels too theoretical, too poetic, but self-destruction is material, overwhelmingly felt, and embodied.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“I decided I could either leap off the stage and whoop his ass or love the black man who had been taught to hate his reflection. I kept reading. And I chose to love him.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“The thirst for power leaves the spirit arid.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Dreams are the destinations we arrive at as we chase our wishes and our callings.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Memoir can provide an entryway into the life of the writer. On the journey, reader might run up against some semblance of their own lives captured in the sentences of another's story.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“If Camden is a ghetto, it is because some force, comprised of many hands, made it so. That, too, must be named.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Discovering the difference between what's true and all the lies one comes to believe requires a direct confrontation with the past.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“To discover and name what shapes us is to engage in the work of history.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“These forms of repression are the hands that do their best work unseen.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Anyone who grew up in a city-turned-ghetto knows something about calculated calamity, even if its hard to pinpoint the culprit.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“I might have begun to understand why so many of the people I encountered in my classrooms and at bus stops seemed to carry the weight of hopelessness alongside profound, unrelenting courage.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“If white people were deemed poor, the problem was not inherent or a consequence of their personhood. They were considered outliers, the city’s “poor white trash,” because they ostensibly failed to make good on their whiteness, the promissory note ensuring their social and economic ascent in America.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“We served two Gods, our lusts and our shame.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“When mostly white donors gave money, out of a type of love that really resembled guilt, their hearts were not bent toward my family and neighbors necessarily. They were moved by the emotional vulnerability of other white people who claimed proximity to Camden's people and stories by subjecting themselves to the way of life in an impoverished city.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“i was in search of a man who, like my father, would stand before me bare and offer me safety. No one picked me up that day. My heart broke. This, too, is the stuff of black boys' dreams.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

“Marital infidelity and imperfections aside, the respect reserved for King has as much to do with America's fascination with black men it regards as great, even when those same men have been demonized and killed before their deification.”
― Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America