Quotes from Emily Bernard

in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself.

This was real life - no magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

The problem is not the visibility of dark skin, but who sees it and what the viewer feels motivated to do next.

When the words won't come, I take my work for a walk. Literally, I put pages in my pocket and take a hike in an unfamiliar place...." — @emilyebernard

perpetuating the pain of the past. Is the telling the salve or the wound?

In order to narrate her own life, she needs another person to listen, to aid in the tending of her interior.

Race is a social construction for which there is no scientific basis; racism is the foundation of that construction...but when I am out in the world with my daughters, it is not a construction or it's consequences that I fear will hurt them. What I fear are human beings, white human beings, who are not made of theory, but of flesh and blood.

This is marriage, I thought, or at least my marriage. It is not the stories of forbidden desire that thrilled me as a girl, or even magical rides through clouds and on dark waters. It is John's right hand in mine, and his left one sure and steady on the wheel.

This is your pain,' she said. 'You must bear witness.

I am black - and I am brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.