Home > Author > Tommy Orange
141 " That kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced. "
― Tommy Orange , There There
142 " I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore. "
143 " to roll with the punches, all the ways you’ve been fucked over, knocked down, what you’ve recovered from or haven’t, that you’ve walked or limped "
144 " In 1621, colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. "
145 " Time only seems to have skipped, or to have sped by without you when you looked the other way. That's what Opal has been doing. Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears. "
146 " How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it? —JAVIER MARÍAS "
147 " Rob probably didn’t look any further into the quote because he’d gotten what he wanted from it. "
148 " If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. "
149 " It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing. "
150 " Death alone eludes hard work and hardheadedness. That and memory. But there’s no time and no good reason most of the time to look back. Leave them alone and memories blur into summary. "
151 " You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian, "
152 " Dene is not recognizably Native. He is ambiguously nonwhite. "
153 " You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not. "
154 " I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at the place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn't feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and it's like it's not gonna hurt as much anymore. "
155 " Can’t stand what the youth are allowed to become these days. Coddled babies, all of them, with no trace of skin, no toughness left. There’s something wrong about all of it. Something about the ever-present phone glow on their faces, or the too-fast way they tap their phones, their gender-fluid fashion choices, their hyper-PC gentle way of being while lacking all social graces and old-world manners and politeness. "
156 " that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. "
157 " You gotta know about the history of your people. How you got to be here, that's all based on what people have done to get you here. Us bears, you Indians, we been through a lot. They tried to kill us. But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest. There were bears and Indians all over the place. Sister, they slit all our throats. "
158 " This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. "
159 " While I was talking something in me reached back to remember all that I’d once hoped I’d be, and placed it next to the feeling of being who I am now. "
160 " He tells himself he means more. He tells himself he can tell himself and believe it. "
