"…For a long time, it debilitated me a lot. Nothing that I wrote was good enough. I’d start writing then be like, “Nope. This is sh–.” And that was a really negative experience to have with my writing, because the more I said that, it was almost like the writing in my heart would cower into a corner and be like, “I’m not coming out.” I really had to work through a few weeks of being kind to myself and saying, “Your job is to get to the desk, have your pen out, and write, write, write, write.” You have to get through the bad stuff before you can get to the pit of everything that you really enjoy…"

"People aren’t used to poetry that’s so easy and simple."

"I used to submit to anthologies and magazines when I was a student – but I knew I was never going to be picked up. All their writing was, you know, about the Canadian landscape or something. And my poem is about this woman with her legs spread open."

"When you see someone who looks like your mom there and she’s like ‘this puts so much of my pain into something concrete that I can hold,’…That’s when I’m like okay, I’m doing something right and I just want to keep doing it."

"The fundamental violence of colonialism, then, is perhaps the inculcated sense, a sensation that bubbles up most acutely by way of the physiological, that your body is not yours to keep, that it is never solely yours to maintain sovereign control over."

"Poets pledge allegiance to a country I don't believe in."

"I’m okay with waiting. I’ve found what I need to find. Whenever the mood strikes me, I wait until I’m home in my apartment. I put on blast. I close my eyes. And I dance."

"For many of us, doing physical activity is a highly emotionally charged, even dangerous, undertaking. Sports and exercise are sites of intense where regressive notions about the meaning of “male” and female” come to the fore. Public s are dangerous for , who are often stereotyped and stigmatized as potential who make “real women” feel uncomfortable. Exercise clothing is frequently revealing and emphasizes our bodies in ways that “outs” us to strangers or triggers . Even supposedly activities are actually as a result of stereotypes about “” versus “” forms of exercise."

"As I twirled, cha-cha-ed and clapped my hands to the beat, I began to remember, for the first time in a long time, those moments I used to steal as a kid, dancing alone in my room with headphones on. Those fleeting moments when what I looked like didn’t matter, only what I felt. Only this time, I wasn’t a child anymore. There was no one who could burst in unannounced, laugh at me, punish me, force me to stop. I felt so free, so beautiful, in a way I had written off as impossible for me long ago. ... My inner dancer began to emerge from the deep pit where I had kept her all this time. I found the girlhood I was never allowed."

"There are a million tiny privileges that people take for granted that cannot: access to , to physical activity, to taking joy in our own bodies, are among them. Finding a physical activity that I loved came at the cost of putting up with countless small acts of hostility, and finally, I had had enough."

"When I was a little girl (but being raised as a little boy), what I wanted more than anything was to be a dancer. How I longed for it — the lights, the stage, the gorgeous costumes, most of all for the delivering grace of movement in harmony with a choreography greater than myself. Like a little Chinese , I had a beautiful, impossible dream. But unlike Billy Elliot’s, mine was never realized. and two left feet saw to that: I was laughed, bullied, or shamed out of every dance class I attempted."

"If there is one lesson that I have to teach you, dear reader, remember this: cute boys come and go, but The Dance is forever."

"On that day beneath the fluorescent lights of the YMCA, I was transcendent."

"Did you know orchids employ trickery to attract insects? They spray a deceptive scent resembling insect pheromones. Bad flower! Bad flower! Liar! Liar! Petals on fire!"

"Trigger Warning! Rape is a rape is a rape."

"There is an afterlife to love and there is love in the afterlife."

"How do I love thee? Let me count the days. If there are 50 ways to leave your lover then there are 50 ways to be left."

"Inverted heart, becomes the testicles of a man."

"Simpson writing website"

"I do this in my long poems. I have to move between one thing and another and this oscillation is the way I find out what I'm trying to say"

"I find playing with form allows me to play with ideas."

"I can look at the world aslant by using an unusual form and thus take hold of an idea in a unique way."

"The forms often loop back on themselves... circling around on an idea in order to examine it more fully."

"I became a writer when I began to take it seriously."

"I find a way to ground myself, literally by using the ground of places near where I live."

"Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly."

"When I write I am attempting to do justice to something I have glimpsed about the world."

"Modern technology is not simply an extension of human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their co-penetration."

"When we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal. We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness."

"Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our 'worldliness'."

"There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding."

"Excerpt from the poem "W.L.M.K.""

"‘Tell me something about your life, ‘he said. ‘My life?’ the rickshaw-wallah asked. ‘I do not have one.’"

"‘Every man has a vision,’ Nur Hussain said. ‘Whether he understands it or not."

"This day says nothing different to me than to you."

"It is ego that makes a man."

"Imagine a day when this yard will be crowded with hundreds of leaders of the country. They will compete with each other, argue with each other, insult each other, throw shoes, leather bags, teacups, microphones and chairs at each other, break each other’s neck and determination, and then, at the end of the day, shamelessly compromise with each other for the sake of the party, and on the order of the leader."

"People want to see you own something as precious so that they are assured that you are not going to steal from them. The richer the leader, the more respected he is."

"‘Do not burden yourself with problems that you do not understand,’ he said. ‘If you do, then only the problems win. Human life becomes a tragedy.’"

"Walking is always for tomorrow; yesterday’s walk, today’s walk, tomorrow’s walk – all for tomorrow. That is what this world is."

"It is not mandatory, I thought, that a society must have people who are vile and who rear filthiness instead of grit and ambition."

"There is no good or evil in the world. Only images."

"Suffering is not an otherworldly affair; it will never be that a person won’t be able to unearth the mystery of his suffering in his lifetime."

"‘So this is what famine does to a person,’ I thought as I walked back home. ‘It does not bring one to his knees only; it eats one alive. It is hungrier than a hungry man.’"

"A man should have the right to choose his own shoes."

"No man is more of a stranger to you than you are to him. Receive him with trust."

"The taller the building, the better the view."

"Shoes could be sold and resold, unlike a Constitution."