Dionne Brand Quotes

#1. Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

Dionne Brand

#2. 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.

Dionne Brand

#3. Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

Dionne Brand

#4. I felt the unordinary romance of / women who love women for the first time.

Dionne Brand

#5. If I am peaceful ... is not peace,/is getting used to harm.

Dionne Brand

#6. 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

#7. Education is such a noble profession, it's a wonderful way to serve.

Erin Gruwell

#8. People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death.

Dionne Brand

#9. They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

Dionne Brand

#10. Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

Dionne Brand

#11. 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.

Dionne Brand

#12. 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.

Dionne Brand

#13. Dance floors would bleed from the knife of her dress

Dionne Brand

#14. She could assassinate streets with her eyes

Dionne Brand

#15. "With ev'ry pleasing, ev'ry prudent part, Say, what can Chloe want?"-She wants a heart.

Alexander Pope

#16. Nations are like men - growing old, never young. My son had the misfortune to be a young man of an old nation.

Gene Wolfe

#17. A boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat
still has all the possibilities of moving

Dionne Brand

#18. The greatest enemy we can face is ourselves, and the greatest battle is against the darkness within.

Derek Landy

#19. I don't need made-up strength. I'm strong enough on my own - me, Meira, no magic or conduit or anything.

Sara Raasch