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Kai Cheng Thom QUOTES

Kai Cheng Thom QUOTES

1 " Models of justice that centre punishment do not prevent abuse but only react to it, and they don't offer a pathway toward healing for either perpetrators or survivors. Nor do they acknowledge the dual reality that a great many perpetrators are themselves survivors. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

2 " Kimaya is also looking in the mirror, and I meet her gaze there. There is a look I do not like in her expression, a hint of something that doesn’t match her sweet tone and seems totally alien for my warm, generous femme sister. It is a look like I might wear—eyes narrow and lips pursed. She’s peering at herself, not liking what she sees.

And I think about how fish means jealousy among femmes. About how we are all so hungry for what each other has, when the truth is none of us has enough to begin with. I think about how strange and funny it is that there are many femmes who would kill, who would sell their souls to Dr. Crocodile, for the chance to leave the Street of Miracles, when all my life I have been running toward it.

And I think about how Kimaya is right, how fish means opportunity and privilege. Someday, I may swim away from here into another place. I remember my little sister back in Gloom, and how escaping always seems to mean leaving someone behind. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

3 " you are always disappearing in the hope of being seen. you are always shrinking to fit into someone else’s arms. you are collapsing ever inward, a galaxy trying to become smaller. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , A Place Called No Homeland

4 " It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

5 " When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

6 " I wanted to protect you, but I'm starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

7 " A sanctuary is a place where the door only locks from the inside "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

8 " That's the difference between love and hunger," she says. "Hunger is a story you gt stuck in. Love's the story that takes you somewhere new. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

9 " Sometimes to be somebody else, you have to be nobody first "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

10 " You will be able to stop hurting people when you stop hurting yourself. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

11 " Little cocoon apartment, I love how you rattle and shake in the wind. You are mine like nothing has ever been before. Someday you'll tear open, and I'll fly out with the wings I have grown inside you. Still shimmering. Still wet. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

12 " When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

13 " Books are like this magical window that you can open no matter where you are and you fall into a different place that´s better than the one you´re trapped in. "

― Kai Cheng Thom

14 " When they looked at me and my sister, even their love was hungry. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

15 " It's good for you to cry sometimes. Even if there isn't a reason. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

16 " We sit together and wait. For the time to pass. For the memories to fade. For the waiting to be over "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

17 " there is a poem
scratched onto the walls of my throat
no one has heard it
but it is there "

― Kai Cheng Thom , A Place Called No Homeland

18 " Some people will cling on to anything that makes them feel even a little bit free. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

19 " The world spins and spins. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do but surrender. There is nothing you can do but stand in your best friend's dingy kitchen and bake cakes and cry and hope hope hope for something better to come. Nothing you do will ever stop the world turning, will ever tilt the planet off its axis. All revolutions are futile in the end. "

― Kai Cheng Thom , Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

20 " some bodies can't be touched/some poems
cannot be written/just felt "

― Kai Cheng Thom , A Place Called No Homeland