Quotes from Dionne Brand

And truly, when I think about it, no one owes me a proper and truthful account of their life. And I don't owe anyone veracity when it comes to mine.

dance floors would bleed from the knife of her dress

The smell of hurrying passed my nostrils with the smell of sea water and fresh fish wind, there was history which had taught my eyes to look for escape even beneath the almond leaves fat as women, the conch shell tiny as sand, the rock stone old like water. I learned to read this from a woman whose hand trembled at the past, then even being born to her was temporary, wet and thrown half dressed among the dozens ofbrown legs itching to run.

The ric rac running ofyour story remains braided in other wars, Liney, no one is interested in telling thetruth. History will only hear you if you give birth to a woman who smoothes starched linen in the wardrobe drawer, trembles when she walks and who gives birth to another woman who cries near a river and vanishes and who gives birth to a woman who is a poet, and, even then.

Though actually kids did not need liberating except from normative training. So it was an anti-colonial project of a sort to defend children from the state.

Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast.

The sky over the wharf is a sometime-ish sky, it changes with the moods and anxieties of the clerk, it is ink blue as her coat or grey as sea or pink as evening clouds. It is cobalt as good luck or manganite as trouble.

I hate the past and for that matter the present

Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here

No argument in the world is ever resolved. Resolving would suggest some liquid in which arguments could be immersed, perhaps love. But it must be love enough.

And truly, when I think about it, no one owes me a proper and truthful account of their life. And I don't owe anyone veracity when t comes to mine.

I felt the unordinary romance of / women who love women for the first time.

Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death.

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.

I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm.

a boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

so don't tell me how love will rescue me, I was carnivorous about love, I ate love to the ankles, my thighs are gnawed with love still and yet I cannot have loved, since living was all I could do and for that, I was caged in bone spur endlessly

And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition - the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There's so much spillage.

People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death.

It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard.