Quotes from Joy Kogawa

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

Language to me is a tool a very clumsy tool. And words are garden tools with which to till the soil of one's life.

From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain.

Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power.

Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?" "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back

Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.

Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"-love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread.

some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain.

Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky.

we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".

What else would anyone want to know? Personality: Tense. Is that past or present tense? It's perpetual tense.

Aunt Emily's writing is as wispy and hard to decipher as the marks of a speed skater on ice.

The sofa is a mountain to climb, a valley for sleeping in, a place of ambush for surprise attacks on passing parents.

The senior matriculation exams obliterate everything. Even, it seems to me, if a war were on in Canada, I'd be found studying like deaf Beethoven playing his piano while Vienna burned.

In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.

Gentle Mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction.

The handwriting in the letter was as even as waves along the beach, row on row of neat curls and dots, perfect pebbles and shells on an ordered shore.