54 quotes
We cannot be owned. We cannot own each other. And there is no such thing as a particle of US soil.
Preface to Silt: Prose Poems (2019)
I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.
Getting Home Alive with Rosario Morales (1986)
Joy is to mood as stars are to the weather, a constant to steer by, sometimes hidden by storm clouds but high above them, untouched by wind or rain.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Let's get one thing straight. Puerto Rico was parda, negra, mulata, mestiza. Not a country of Spaniards at all. We outnumbered them, year after year.
Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas (1997)
Healing takes place in community, in the telling and the bearing witness, in the naming of trauma and in the grief and rage and defiance that follow.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
I have learned that suffering does not improve people, that slavery does not ennoble us for freedom, that oppression springs from oppression, echoing the twisted lessons we learn from our pain.
Getting Home Alive with Rosario Morales (1986)
It is the writing of U.S. women of color, a handful of clear-headed white women, mostly Jewish, a few men who engage gender, mostly gay, that sustains me and gives me context.
Boycotts and divestment are honorable tools of moral persuasion through financial choice. ("BDS and Me")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
I grew up within a legacy of joyous border crossings, of knowing we have the right to love anyone, to learn any language and speak it, to offer ourselves wherever we choose.
Foreword to A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee (2004)
Our bodies are in the mix of everything we call political. (p 10)
Kindling: Writings on the Body (2013)
History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
For me, the destruction of the land and the poisoning and violation of my body are inseparable, wound together on the spindle of a conquest that from the beginning was narrated as a sexual act.
Forward to Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare (2015)
it's essential that we understand this: every struggle is an ecological struggle.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
The first rule I remember learning was never to harm or deface a book. The second was never to cross a picket line. (Introduction/Acknowledgements)
Getting Home Alive with Rosario Morales (1986)
Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experience of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
In the work I do, repetition is a method, a rhythm of meaning that must be maintained, a beat to my message. ("Libation")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
There are people who move into the cultures of others with such grace and respect that the friction of foreignness virtually disappears, who can un-self-consciously love the unfamiliar as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Foreword to A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee (2004)
Of every proposal for any kind of social action I ask whether it will increase the sum of human solidarity, because solidarity is the antidote to oppression, which always seeks to dehumanize and divide us.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)