Quotes from Jennifer Clement

Eli Redmond is the breeze that makes a hurricane form in the Atlantic.

When we walk I hear your footsteps and miss your voice

What most people don't understand about Jean-Michel is that his crazy behavior had nothing to do with being an enfant terrible. Everything he did was an attack on racism and I loved him for this.

Si no hablabas de algo entonces no había sucedido. Pero seguro que alguien iba a escribir un corrido. Todo lo que supuestamente no se debe saber, eso de lo que no se debe hablar, tarde o temprano acaba en un corrido.

To have a man kiss you in a women's jail is a gift better than any birthday or Christmas present. It's better than a bouquet of roses. It's better than a warm shower. I could imagine living in this jail for years and living for every workshop day and that male kiss on my cheek. That kiss was rain, sunshine, and the sweet air of outside. Yes. I knew I'd even sit there and glue stupid things onto cardboard sheets just to get that kiss again.

High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.

He paints a simple square house with a triangle roof that has an S inside, Because, Suzanne, you are my home.

He loved to shock, even with generosity. It was like punching someone.

A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn't even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitchens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the art world: he had entered through the back door. He broke into the white art world in a way that had never been done before by any black.

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes NOT FOR SALE on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a graffiti artist and primitive. They don't invent a childhood for white artists, he says.

Jean was black and had to present himself as separate from graffiti somehow. Keith was gay and white and could glamorize graffiti in a way that Jean could not. Jean and Keith both understood this.

I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

You can't get your arms to stop making circles in the air if you never say good-bye.

Suzanne's mother says, 'Children, you don't need to be going and leaving and looking for a rainbow. The rainbow is here.