Home > Author > Dionne Brand
41 " VERSO 33.2What part of this are you letting go, the clerk asks, because it seems to me none of this belongs on the dock with me. The clerk is being clerical, she doesn't want to handle every passing stray thought of the author, let alone every feeling. Every feeling need not be considered, else there would be no room left in the world. No room. The author finds it hard to rise in the mornings, whatever she is carrying lies as a boulder on her forehead when she opens her eyes, though it is invisible to anyone else. The clerk thinks it is mere self-indulgence. The author agrees. But what do you do with a feeling like that? It is certainly an embarrassment, to look at a recumbent discarded mattress and feel homesick, or as if one had lost some great love. "
― Dionne Brand , The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
42 " Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. "
― Dionne Brand , A Map to the Door of No Return
43 " She whispered gutturally into telephones, she checked hidden notes, she made calculations and her whole body was like a bit of reddened coal. At the time June did not expect more than that; Beatriz was clearly passing through and this explosive impermanence was precisely what June wanted at the time. Not love but the fissive encounter, the intense ideas and intense sex and the hypersense that every moment was atomic and defining. Of course one cannot live at that pitch forever, though naturally one wants to. Sydney "
― Dionne Brand , Love Enough
44 " I hate the past and for that matter the present "
― Dionne Brand , At the Full and Change of the Moon
45 " Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here "
46 " No argument in the world is ever resolved. Resolving would suggest some liquid in which arguments could be immersed, perhaps love. But it must be love enough. "
47 " And truly, when I think about it, no one owes me a proper and truthful account of their life. And I don't owe anyone veracity when t comes to mine. "
― Dionne Brand , Theory
48 " If there was history being made in the city, if history was the high-level war rich people waged for their own turf in the city—those wars about waterfront developments and opera houses and real-estate deals and privatization contracts—then the poor waged wars for control of their small alleyways and walkways, their streets and the trade in unofficial goods. Their currency was not stocks, wealth and influence peddling, but tough reputations and threats of physical damage; their gains weren’t stock options and expensive homes but momentary physical control and perennially contested fearsomeness. This war was a more volatile war, perhaps. There was no cushion of security to land on if you lost a skirmish. "
― Dionne Brand , What We All Long For
49 " But what the fuck did she see in Reiner? That’s what he wanted to know. Well, given the things he’d been thinking about before Jackie came into the café, perhaps it was obvious what she saw in Reiner. Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it, took possession of Jackie’s back, guiding her across the street with one hand, warding off traffic with the other, in which he balanced his coffee. Look at his face, it spoke of someone in control and certainly not threatened. Someone comfortable, easy. "