Open Water Quotes

“You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn't open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point, you must breathe.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain in tact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you're scared of what it means to do so.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Perhaps that is how we should frame this question forever; rather than asking what is your favourite work, let’s ask, what continues to pull you back?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It's easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Besides, sometimes, to resolve desire, it's better to let the thing bloom. To feel this thing, to let it catch you unaware, to hold onto the ache. What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“There’s so much more you wish to say but there aren’t the words.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Language fails us, and sometimes our parents do too. We all fail each other, sometimes small, sometimes big, but look, when we love we trust, and when we fail, we fracture that joint.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“I know I'm a photographer, but if someone else says I'm that, it changes things because what they think about me isn't what I think about me.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You have always wondered under what conditions unconditional love breaks, and you believe that betrayal might be one of them.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You've been wondering about your own relationship to open water. You've been wondering about the trauma and how it always finds its way to the surface, floating in the ocean. You've been wondering about how to protect that trauma from consumption. You've been wondering about departing, about being elsewhere.
You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn't open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You wish you had the words, no, you wish you had the courage to climb up from whatever pit you have fallen into, but right now, you do not.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Your few days together have been spent doing nothing really, which is something, is an intimacy in itself.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“She tells you she loves you and now you know that you don't have to be the sum of your traumas, that multiple truths exist, that you love her too.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You dance through topics like two old friends, finding comfort in a language which is instantly familiar. You create a small world for yourselves, and for you both only, sitting on this sofa, looking out at the world which has a tendency to engulf even the most alive.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“To love someone like that, to know how beautiful and wholesome and healing such a love is, and to turn your back on it required no strength at all.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Meeting someone on a summer's evening is like giving a dead flame new life.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“She still thinks about you a lot. Your lives unstitched themselves, but the loose threads remain where the garment was torn.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It's -' You pause, frowning to yourself as you reach for the right expression. 'You can't live in a vacuum. And when you let people in and you make yourself vulnerable, they're able to have an effect on you. If that makes sense.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You don't talk here, but even if you did, the words would fail you, language insufficient to reflect the intense mess of being this intimate with another.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It is a strange thing, to desire your best friend; two pairs of hands wandering past boundaries, asking forgiveness rather than permission; "Is this OK?" coming a fraction after the motion.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“of unresolved grief, large and small, of others assuming that he, beautiful Black person in gorgeous Black body, was born violent and dangerous; this assumption, impossible to hide, manifesting in every word and glance and action, and every word and glance and action ingested and internalized, and it’s unfair and unjust, this sort of death”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“...What time are you seeing her?'
'How do you know it's a woman?'
'This isn't my first rodeo
'What do you mean?'
'You look like you got hit by a bus, and you dusted yourself off, and did it again for the hell of it. You look like you're wondering when the next time you can get hit by that bus is.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water