Home > Author > Jess Row
1 " The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They’re categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be. "
― Jess Row
2 " What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences. "
3 " Country’s friggin’ dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker. "
― Jess Row , The Empties
4 " In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn’t find another use for and couldn’t compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you’d see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back. "
5 " In my study, there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read & reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. "
― Jess Row , The Train to Lo Wu
6 " If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself? "
7 " It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that. "
8 " Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. "
9 " But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history? "
10 " Worried about getting a life? Forget that. Get a lifestyle. "
― Jess Row , Your Face in Mine
11 " Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've done?If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself? "
12 " Were I a black man, it occurs to me, working or not, in this city, I would have a dry-cleaning bill. "
