Memoirists From The United States

"I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name."

"Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are [...]."

"It never occurred to me that I had brought him not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember."

"He was waiting for me to say something. He was staring at me. This, I think, is the first time I dared myself to stare back at him. Usually, I'd cast a glance and then look away—look away because I didn't want to swim in the lovely, clear pool of his eyes unless I'd been invited to—and I never waited long enough to know whether I was even wanted there; look away because I was too scared to stare anyone back; look away because I didn't want to give anything away; look away because I couldn't acknowledge how much he mattered. Look away because that steely gaze of his always reminded me of how tall he stood and how far below him ranked."

""Later!" The word, the voice, the attitude. I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again. It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!"

"…You consciously weave certain things in. Then some things are unconsciously woven into the book, both because you write one poem at a time but also because the motivations for each poem exist within the world of that poem. They subconsciously transcend the world of that poem and go to other places…"

"…it’s really easy to get caught up in how you’re hurt and not really think about whom you are actually hurting. At football games, they kneel, but they’re not kneeling for domestic violence in the NFL. They’ve had a huge rate of domestic violence, intensely physical domestic violence that has become public, and you know that’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s not even talking about accusations of sexual assault. It’s not talking about the actual murdering. This is part of the culture where men, who have been professional athletes, have done things. We don’t talk about that. They aren’t kneeling for that."

"I like to think that the poem is trying to hit you in the gut. I like to think that the poem comes from someplace [of] deep and intense emotion and [is] this thing that I can't run away from..."

"…I like to think that I'm just part of the struggle because we all sort of exist in this thing, trying to figure out what it means to be human day-to-day and what it means to have, like, suffered and made other people suffer."

"Fiction is something that I've always wanted to write. I think that I give myself a break when I write fiction. And that's not to take anything away from people that write fiction, because I know that it's just as taxing, and there's so much involved with that. But for me, I write poems because I have to, and I write stories because I want to. When I'm writing stories, I tend to write stories when, like right now, I'm writing a lot of stories because I'm trying to get away from this collection of poems. It's just killing me. But, that's kind of what it is for me."

"The setting, with all of its contradictions, is crucial. The land provides a deceptive promise of freedom, yet also presents itself as a burden. I’m drawn to these contradictions. They feed the emotional intensity of the novel…"

"I think it’s relative to the story you’re writing. Some novels are filled with summary and some are filled with scenes. Others are a beautiful, confusing mix, of course. Ultimately, I wanted to write a novel that I’d want to read later."

"I think there’s this cult of objectivity in the U.S. about media. There are two sides to every story, but it’s not always objective that one side has as much right to narrate a story. I think it’s distorting to always impose that 50-50 impulse on everything you cover because otherwise you’ll be branded as “liberal” or “having an agenda.” Life is not 50-50…"

"Whether they're drinking wine in the evening or painting something "offensive," Iranians choose not to dwell on the fact that they could receive some seventh-century punishment. Laws are inconsistently enforced, and you can usually pay off police to look the other way."

"I believe their race and religious background shaped the way they were treated by the media… The willingness to blame them even though they were clearly victims was distressing."

"One big difference I’ve noticed is how class is experienced in both places. Even though America is so class-stratified, the idea that there is a national culture that transcends class is really present. In Iran, despite the revolution and its attempt to eliminate class as a category, there’s now political class. That’s different than social class, but it’s still very much infused with the nuance that comes from a class-stratified place."

"Once I wrote poems, I found that I was able to piece together individual moments that would, I’d hoped, sometimes compound. The line was the most important thing to me—that and the music it produced."

"I always used to say strongly that I was not an autobiographical writer, so strongly it was clearly suspicious…Even without this book, I can now say that is just a lie."

"I always feel that how people treat animals is not too far from how people treat each other, especially under stress or under certain circumstances…"

"I like to think a thought and then I like to follow it, like a little seed, for a long time and see where that growth leads me. Sometimes it leads me to an entirely different place from where it started and that gives me joy."

"There is a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think for those of us who have crossed borders, the artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut — old life, that’s old country, and there’s new life, new country.…"

"Among Chinese-American writers, two immediately come to mind: Yiyun Li and Ha Jin, with their particular mix of displaced characters, circumstances and past. Their stories often have tragedy, but rise above that. They elicit discomfort and compassion — good and necessary conditions that change me, as any writing is capable of doing by putting me in unfamiliar situations and magnifying the details I would have overlooked."

"Youth can be a great asset. When you’re young, if you have what is called a ‘crazy’ dream, no one is going to question it...Instead, if you are sincere and willing to do the work that prepares the way for your journey, others will often be inspired by you and partner with you to help you achieve your dreams."

"In urban culture, funeral directors have a certain level of prestige. They're right up there with preachers and politicians. They wear suits and drive Cadillacs and Lincolns. In the era of segregation, running a funeral home was one of the only ways that African-American men could legally make money and rise up…"

"The hardest lesson that I learned is that “rejection is protection”. Rejection never feels good, but as artists I think we tend to take rejection so personally. It can cause us to doubt our work or talent. However, rejection isn’t always someone saying we don’t like your work or you’re not talented. Sometimes it’s someone else recognizing that they can’t give you what you need to fly. It’s a venue saying this is not quite the right fit for you right now. That doesn’t mean that you won’t find home for your work. That doesn’t mean that venue won’t come looking for you one day. It means you have to keep working hard until you find the perfect fit and when the time is right it will work itself out."

"My wife gave me a gift at the end of her column when she left me that empty space, one I would like to offer you. A blank space to fill. The freedom and permission to write your own story. Here is your empty space. What will you do with your own fresh start?"

"I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet."

"For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need."

"I tend to believe whatever you decide to look for you will find, whatever you beckon will eventually beckon you."

"The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin 'litterae,' you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means 'things made of letters."

"You are my first love.” And then, “You will be my only love."

"And then she said and I have Rebecca, you know? Sort of the idea is I was delightful, and she said I was delightful, but in the context you could see I was a calamity nonetheless. I mean I think there was a real ambivalence about the role of children in lives of independent, thinking women. And what was transmitted to me was not that being a mom was the worst possible choice, but that it could definitely be a serious hindrance. And that there were other things worth pursuing more."

"She once told me that because I am lighter-skinned than her I would be treated better, and then the divorce from my father, I think she felt betrayed by whiteness in a certain kind of way, and I represent that whiteness."

"I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two."

"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle ... I'm going with B, everything."

"Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself."

"…I had to be in a different frame of mind to be able to deal with those families who were grieving, and a lot of emotions. But the rule was that I wasn't allowed to cry or be emotional regardless of what I saw on a day-to-day basis. So if it was a baby, if it was a homicide, if there was someone who died naturally, a cute, little old lady, I wasn't allowed to cry."

"Their take on me was, 'Look, you're not afraid you will be gassed, you're not drinking out of the coloured water fountain; you've got it really good,' so they didn't really understand that being biracial and the child of divorce would affect me in the way it did."

"I did not, but that’s just my experience. I know a lot of people who do, and that’s where the burden of representation comes in. I’m sitting here telling my specific story, but though I wasn’t comfortable with that, there are thousands of people who are, or thousands who don’t have access to the funds to have surgery."

"The ‘pretty privilege’ can give you access to spaces, just like your able body gives you access. But it makes impossible beauty standards for many other trans girls who are struggling with that right now."

"My grandmother gets who I am, so when you ask me about people who don’t understand, or people who are on their bully pulpits saying you shouldn’t accept people, I’m like: “What’s happened to you that, of all the things you can talk about, of all the injustices in the world, the one thing you want to concentrate on is trans people living their truth? How is that harming you and your identity? How I identify has nothing to do with you, and how you identify has nothing to do with me. Right? So live your life and let me live mine."

"The ball culture is a space started in uptown Manhattan, in Harlem. It was created by a group of black trans women and drag queens who were tired of being pushed out of white drag spaces, where they kept on being upstaged and not given titles. The titles were favored to white queens, white queens who embodied Western culture's idea of beauty and femininity more than the black and brown queens did. So Crystal LaBeija created the scene, and it has become this kind of community space — one where a lot of orphaned people, homeless folk, trans and queer people gather together in houses…"

""Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention," writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Although the genocide convention is not retroactive (it only became applicable in the United States in 1988, the year the US Senate ratified it), it is a useful lens for studying Indigenous history."

"In her acclaimed 2014 book An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz renarrates the dominant story of American history, foregrounding the settler colonial practices that disrupted North American Indigenous ways of living, particularly their connection to land and water."

"This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime...Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) The one I’m reading now; “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a history of how the United States evolved to where we are as a nation besieged by gun violence. This is not the kind of book I’d usually read, but I loved her earlier book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”; reading it was like going back to school and gaining a new perspective of the Americas, one that retrieved the lost history of my ancestors."

"Dunbar was extremely charismatic. "It was meeting her that turned me into a feminist instantly, Linda Gordon recalled."

"Every society has an origin narrative that explains that society to itself and the world with a set of stories and symbols. The origin myth, as scholar-activist Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has termed it, defines how a society understands its place in the world and its history. The myth provides the basis for a nation's self-defined identity. Most origin narratives can be called myths because they usually present only the most flattering view of a nation's history; they are not distinguished by honesty. Ours begins with Columbus "discovering" a hemisphere where some 80 million people already lived but didn't really count"

"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement, one that has never been attempted by any other historian or intellectual... It is truly an Indigenous peoples' voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz's book direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention."