Grievers Quotes

“Most of the time it felt like she had too much happening in her head to get it coherent in her mouth.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“It's sacred work, love. It's an altar."
Dune hesitated to own that. "I've been seeing it as a research project. I mean Kama used to make altars. But we never had some clear lineage. I don't want to be..." Dune paused, then made a gesture of grabbing things all around her.
"You can't, Don't worry."
"Yes, I can. I don't belong to anything, it doesn't belong to me."
"Well that's just the thing," Elouise turned to Dune with soft eyes. "When everything has been taken, filling that emptiness ain't appropriation. It's something else. It ain't pure, none of it. I think of these practices, my Orisha, my altars, my prayers and chants, and all this accumulation of spiritual armor, as something to comfort me when my ancestral ghost limbs hurt. Because I need Spirit so much! I answer what calls me ­­­­­- Spirit is bigger than any lineage! It comes through all these channels. It's complicated, beautifully complicated. But it ain't appropriation, not amongst displaced and denied peoples. It's different.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“Turning towards or away was one of the simplest expressions of being alive. Deer turned towards predators, babies turned towards the breast, flowers turned towards the sun. Dune wondered again: what was it that could snatch so much essence out of a person that they were less motivated to survive than a flower?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“The colder it got, the shorter these stolen days would be, the whispering space between life and death.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“the virus a spiraling, bleak art.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“She noticed her physical discomfort from a distance, her self tiny and numb inside of her skin.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“Autumn came in shocks, the temperature dropping as if slipping down a stair, recovering itself into some balance, and then slipping again on the next step. It had been such a sticky summer, and the heat didn't seem ready to release the city, sliding back in after each cold snap, a lover returning for one more kiss.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“Dune had learned, was learning, that when you lose enough people, you stop getting as close to the new ones that come into your life. She stopped looking ahead and started focusing all her attention on the memories. Things used to be so great, so pure, so just, so perfect. We look back and excavate the most beautiful version of the histories.”
― adrienne maree brown, Grievers

“The old woman had given up speaking, she no longer needed a listener. And Dune didn't know how to fill space. Most of the time it felt like she had too much happening in her head to get it coherent in her mouth.”
― adrienne maree brown, Grievers