Trouble the Saints Quotes

“Sometimes I don’t know how we will survive each other. Sometimes the greatest violence you can do to another person is to love them.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“Fight, Pea. If we die, let it be screaming, not with a bullet to the back of the head because we hid behind the line. Fight, Pea. I love our daughter more than I should, more than any logic can explain, and she doesn't yet exist apart from you, and I am telling you to fight her, our sweet Durga, if in entering this world she tries to take you from it-

And if she does, or if one of those bullets finds its mark on me, please believe, Phyllis- we are connected by more than this love or this lifetime. When we return to the wheel of life, you and I, we will find one another again and again, seven lifetimes and seven lifetimes more, until the colonized and the enslaved and the abused will rise up with the holy strength of the gods behind them and, together, we will make it right.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“Sometimes the greatest violence you can do to another person is to love them.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“At its easiest, love is a blanket; at its hardest, a black mirror—it isn’t just your flaws that show stark against that high-yellow skin, it’s your ghosts.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“It is difficult to get a woman to understand something that her heart depends upon her not understanding.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“Mrs. Montgomery was sitting on the stoop, playing gin with her sister, Miss Reynolds—who always insisted on being called “Miss” no matter how many gray hairs she pushed under that church hat on Sundays, because she never married, and she wasn’t ever gonna be anyone’s missus.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“He smiled a little, mostly with his eyes. He could be unsettlingly gentle, and I liked him, even when he scared me. After all, I sometimes liked myself, too.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“He dangled subjects like fishhooks, and baited them with implied interrogatives.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

“On the job, we passed around the story of a prison guard, one who pulled the switch on the hot squat. Man woke up one day and could no longer pull that lever. It did not matter that the prisoner would die anyway. It did not matter for what crime. Sometimes a human soul can no longer mete out death, no matter how justified, without destroying itself entirely.”
― Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints