Quotes from Dionne Brand

The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.

If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they've been. If I see a city I see it's living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it's needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.

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

It is not the job of writers to lift 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. ?—A Map to the Door of No Return - Dionne Brand

We'd appraise each other, in the provisional way that lovers do, by attaching great depth and significance to the provisional. How, after all, do you know anyone? You take in certain physical and emotional characteristics that you've aestheticized, ignoring the facts. You listen to what a lover has to say, taking in the erotic music of their sound, their timbre, while dismissing the lyrics.

I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn't yet exist on a map." [...] 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 on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

I was someone who lived in anxiety. I felt anxiety was part of being conscious in the world; it was a prerequisite of a moral and ethical life. I don't mean the anxieties of Capital, I mean the anxieties of an unfinished world, the unfinished projects of the imagination, as Wilson Harris would put it.

She could assassinate streets with her eyes

Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

I run each morning, two, three, sometimes four kilometers. Part of March, all of April, all of May. I can't run five. I am eating up kilometers on my way to where it is always twilight. I am running out of this world.

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn't. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn't let her. She didn't believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it, easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists