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1 " Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country. "
― Dionne Brand , What We All Long For
2 " The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing. "
― Dionne Brand , A Map to the Door of No Return
3 " There were Italian neighbourhood and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable except in the name of the city itself. They'd only have to look, though, but it could be that what they know hurts them already, and what if they found out something even more damaging? These are people who are used to the earth beneath them shifting, and they all want it to stop-and if that means they must pretend to know nothing, well, that's the sacrifice they make. "
4 " un soir de guerre et ceux qui regardent parmi nous bouche béevoient la beauté devenir effroyablecoucher de soleil, souffle de nuages gris aux stries rougesnous observons une maison qui brûletout l'après-midi, toute la nuittoutes les nuits nous regardons un autre feu qui brûleMardi Butler houseMercredi radio grenade libreJeudi poste de police [...]à chaque bruit nouveau de la guerredans la froide lumière de cinq heures du matinil manque quelque chosequelques parties du corpsquelques lieux de ce mondeune île, un endroit auquel penserJe marche sur un rocher d'un rivage de la Barbadecherchant où était grenadeà présent le vol d un bombardier américainlaisse une trace de viol dans la chambrede chaque réveil que devons nous faire aujourd'huiprêt à combattre couchés dans le couloir à les attendrela peur nous tient éveilléset nous fait rêver de sommeil "
― Dionne Brand
5 " Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. "
6 " I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. "
7 " They were born in the city from people born elsewhere. "
8 " If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm. "
9 " a boat, even a wrecked and wretched boatstill has all the possibilities of moving "
― Dionne Brand , Inventory
10 " Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants. "
11 " He believed in nothing. Which is why his departures and his pursuit of the most intense feelings and acts were so radical, so deep and honest. The truth of life was perfectly clear to him. Nothing was made, every new morning was clear. His only challenge was inward. He had not been disillusioned or had some bad experience that he could put it all down to. He had simply seen the world and that was that. And he understood how slippery every moment was and he liked the thrill of it. Slipping from the knowable to the unknown, walking from one street to the next, being different all the time. In one afternoon he could slip from one personality to another. Why not? "
― Dionne Brand , At the Full and Change of the Moon
12 " so don’t tell me how love will rescue me, I was carnivorous about love, I ate love to the ankles, my thighs are gnawed with love still and yet I cannot have loved, since living was all I could do and for that, I was caged in bone spur endlessly "
― Dionne Brand , Ossuaries
13 " And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition - the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There's so much spillage. "
14 " People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. "
15 " It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. "
16 " It's like this with this city -- you can stand on a simple corner and get taken away in all directions. Depending on the weather, it can be easy or hard. If it's pleasant, and the pleasant is so relative, then the other languages making their way to your ears, plus the language of the air itself, which can be cold and humid or wet and hot, this all sums up into a kind of new vocabulary. No matter who you are, no matter how certain you are of it, you can't help but feel the thrill of being someone else. "
17 " If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they’ve been. If I see a city I see it’s living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it’s needs and its discomforts locked in apartments. "
18 " Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display. "
19 " It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. �—"A Map to the Door of No Return" - Dionne Brand "
20 " I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” [...] I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. "
