Home > Author > Amber Dawn
1 " Morning came in through the blinds cutting everything into ribbons. "
― Amber Dawn , Sub Rosa
2 " I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist. "
3 " I’m jealous – not of their money to spend, but jealous that, for them, going home is a simple matter of turning down the correct lane. "
4 " I had spent so much time secretly scared of rape that in that moment I was hardly even afraid anymore. Or rather I had moved on to my next fear—what happens when it’s over? Would I be left there, alone? Injured? Or worse? "
5 " When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles. "
6 " Lying is the work of people who are told their truths have no value. The labour of survival is laden with myth and misunderstanding.Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible. "
― Amber Dawn , How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir
7 " and I loved long driveshow you can close your eyes, then open, and everything around you has changed. "
8 " So tremendous, sadnessdoesn't know where the world endsand my body begins. "
― Amber Dawn , Where the Words End and My Body Begins
9 " Where does one heal when the woundis diagnosed a disorder? "
10 " When I was thinking about How Poetry Saved My Life entering the “big literary world” I more so viewed it as sub genre or an underdog book because there are still comparatively so few books about sex work, especially from authors who once worked street, like I have. Disclosing to working street-level sex work still feels risky to me. Apart from Runaway by Evelyn Lau (published in 1989) I have yet to read a first person memoir about street work. More of these stories must be out there—perhaps I just haven’t found them yet. "
― Amber Dawn
11 " No, you don't write about love for the very same reason you refuse to learn to roller skate. You dislike the idea of introducing anything that requires hurting yourself repeatedly before you get good at it. "
12 " Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible. "
13 " What would Samuel Becket say if he knew that Broadway musicals are all that survived of the theatre world? "
14 " Is desecration teaching?Is violence knowledge? Is hauntinga kind of life? I had no modelfor rebirth. No second coming blueprint. "
15 " When this paragraph ends, this story is all yours. "
16 " ...I learned the power of identity--the idea that even an uneducated woman, like myself, who hadn't read Mary Wollstonecraft or bell hooks, could be an expert on feminism simply because of her identity as a woman. "
17 " I...believe that passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice injures us--it widens the disconnect. The part of us that is hurting does not heal in the dark; we must turn on the light to look at it. We must pay attention. "
18 " [This] story ...is the one I recount to remind myself that I survived and that the worth of my life can be paid back with my truth and my stories. "
19 " He has always been a silent gargoyle sitting at the head of our family table. I've pieced together his story from what little my relatives have shared in hushed disclosures and from reading other soldiers' biographies, visiting museums, and watching the documentary channel. I've adopted historic facts collected by experts and academics as my heritage. I've learned about my grandfather the way many of us (Generation Xers) learn about their elders, whose voices have been muted by dissociation, depression, alcoholism, trauma, and denial. "
