Jonny Appleseed Quotes

“... humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“...leaving home always hurts--home isn't a space, it's a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn't always comfortable--”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“My home is full of hope and ghosts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I didn't have the heart to tell him everything, didn't have the courage to say, man, feeling like that's going to break you if you ain't careful.

"It's my first time, y'know," he said, as if I didn't know. "I hope I didn't do anything wrong. Did I make any mistakes?"

"Mistakes?" I tried hard not to laugh. "Well, let's see, your first mistake was asking that." Then I put my hands on his shoulders and pressed my forehead against his. "And your second one was you thinking you ever owed me a goddamn thing.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I am my own best medicine.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“The nurses were busybodies, I could hear them scurrying about in the rooms adjacent to ours. They were telling jokes and laughing. Their happiness pissed me off. Stop fucking laughing, I thought, my kokum's lying here dead...She wrote up a report and closed my kokum's eyes, then walked out of the room and summoned a doctor. In the room beside us, another nurse was still laughing. Sometimes I don't like how life goes on. And sometimes I don't think it should.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Funny how an NDN "love you" sounds more like, "I'm in pain with you.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Finishing a seven-hour wank session, feeling exhausted, overworked, burnt out, underpaid, sad, hungry, lonely, nostalgic, and strangely beautiful during a one a.m. Sev-run.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Maybe we're more like dandelions. A weed that's a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an Indian home is like a dandelion, pretty, but disposable and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck. My home is full of hope and ghosts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“And I thought about now, thought about my mom’s advice: if I want to survive, I’d have to leave. But it’s hard, you know? Each second I’m away from home is time that’s gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end. How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“These days I find myself far too often talking with myself. The wind ruffles my hair; I hold my palms out to the darkness and wait for someone to take me.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“In the digital universe, a punctuated sentence is as powerful a slap as slamming down the landline.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“I just laughed. I think he got mad. I wish he knew that when an Indian laughs it's because they're applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Then again, I need a lot too. There are tons of unfuckable holes in me that need to be filled.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“the fall left me with a dent in my clavicle, wide enough to contain both of those women's many tears.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“And I thought about now, thought about my mom's advice: If I wanted to survive, I'd have to leave. But it's hard, you know? Each second I'm away from home is time that's gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“There are only a few sounds that always hurt me and one of them is the sound of my mom crying.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“Nobody prepares you for the sting when you're about to leave home. All my life I wanted to leave the rez - and every time I was about to, I stopped myself. It hurts. Leaving hurts.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed