Quotes from Danzy Senna

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called "Never." All the things we would never do. Let's never get married. Let's never get fat. Let's never sleep with a married man. Let's never stop being students, even after we graduate. Let's never get dull-eyed and ironic. Let's never get stuck in a rut-- or trapped in a life we didn't choose. Let's never grow bitter.

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

much privilege leads to bad manners

In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.

My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.

Our eyes caught, and I saw her as she had been and would always be, a long-lost daughter of Mayflower histories, forever in motion, running from or toward an unutterable hideaway.

He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn't want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.

and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field. Love, Gloria

Origins sure are powerful and sh*t. You can't shake them.

I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.

I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn't finish a paper in college? Be a completionist, not a perfectionist.

My father's subject: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an 'excretion' of his or her environment. That's the word he uses. Excretion.

something—to make something right and final—is to kill it.

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn't finish a paper in college? Be a

My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.

I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.