“The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do.”
“Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening.”
As Lulu Miller says, stay wary of words: “The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.”
Foghorn and Gospel
“…sleep’s Jupiterian gravity….”
Life During Wartime
“Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking.”
“I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?“
Disappearing Acts
“Which is to say that thinness is a literal armor against being reproached for being soft, a word that means both yielding, cushiony flesh and the moral weakness that comes from being undisciplined.”
Funny how “almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—“ is named after a man. Imagine if we were surrounded instead by a landscape of places named after women?
On depression: “It seemed to be made out of logic and a real assessment of the situation, but it was weather, and it would disperse like clouds, and gather again like clouds.”
Freely at Night
Books: Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths
“They gave me a sense of how you could mix things, how the personal and the political could spell each other, how a narrative could be oblique, how prose, like poetry, could jump from subject to subject or take flight.”
As women, we get so accustomed to viewing ourselves as others do, (akin to W.E.B. Debois’s double consciousness— “You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.”
Some Uses of Edges
“A book is a little like a star, in that what you read is what the author was passionately immersed in long before, sometimes only because of the time it takes a book to be written, edited, printed, and distributed.”
Diving Into the Wreck
“The process of writing and publishing nonfiction convinced me of my own credibility and capacity to determine what was true and just more than anything else did, and that made me able to stand up, sometimes, for myself, or for others.”
Writing nonfiction as akin to making a collage (combining found objects, existing pieces of knowledge)