Friday, December 06, 2019

Notes: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

"I am writing because they told me never to start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence--I was trying to break free."

"To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger."

"If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent  propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast."

"When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?"

"The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, "I'm not a monster. I'm a mother."

"I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong."

"He was only nine but has mastered the dialect  of damaged American fathers."

"Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war."

"We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward."

"I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it."

"A storm of mother."

"That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else."

"We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another."

"I never wanted to build a "body of work," but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work."

"Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?"

"A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved."

"Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field--it was always there--where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more."

"What have we become to each other if not what we've done to each other?"

"All this time I told myself we were born from war--but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
     Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it."

"To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted."





Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco
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Roland Barthe by Roland Barthe
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Is Trevor pointing us toward the Trevor Project?


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