Daniel Jose Older Quotes

Names always matter," Maz said..."And yours is such a lonely one, when you think about it."
Han had, plenty, and now that familiar sorrow crept back over his heart, an eclipse on never-ending repeat.

The boy had seemed to light up the whole world when he'd first arrived: this simple, impossible sliver of hope amid so much death and destruction.

That's the song for the herbs?" "Mm-hmm." "It makes them happy?" "It makes them work," the woman says. "Prayer puts the world to work. The action you take is your expression of intent. The world listens. And then works. Go

It's just a pretty song until the singer starts. Then something happens. I don't know shit about music, so I couldn't tell you if it's the key she's singing in, or the way her voice slides in between the notes like she's flirting with them, or just the simple truth of her sorrow, coming straight out of her mouth, but whatever it is, the song lays me down and eases all my blissfully aching muscles. It creeps inside my heart, circulates into my bloodstream.

We thought Forever-Player Lando was bad. Head-Over-Heels Lando might be ten times worse."
"Yikes. Hadn't thought of that.

Maybe the word hasn't been invented yet – that thing beyond diversity. We often define movements by what they're against, but the final goal is greater than the powers it dismantles, deeper than any statistic. It's something like equity – a commitment to harvesting a narrative language so broad it has no face, no name.

Just like an organic to be so binary in their logic. A thing can be a thing and also not a thing, you know.

Juniper . . . pets . . . cupcakes. How can one even put those two things in the same . . . It doesn't matter.

It's really nice to meet you, sir. You drive like a wild maniac, and I respect that.

I thought on it and Cane can roll with us . . . . but he definitely gotta be a sidekick. . . . That's the rule, people. Sicka white dudes being all primary in shit. He can be the sidekick or the nosey neighbor. That's it.

You can't tiptoe toward justice. You can't walk up to the door all polite and knock once or twice, hoping someone's home. Justice is a door that, when closed, must be kicked in.

The rain keeps starting and stopping like an anxious lover who doesn't know if he should spend the night.

Probably, all these words would tumble out, these stupid, useless words I've been carrying everywhere like a bouquet of delicate, beautiful, stupid, useless flowers.

Apparently all Puerto Rican moms were the same, even if they weren't your mom.

I'm alive and capable of love, and love is a fucking river. It's never ending and it flows through us, all around us, keeps us alive and decadent, fierce from struggle and genuine in our vulnerability. I

Han hated planning. He also hated preparing. But what he really hated above everything else, besides maybe the Empire itself, was meetings.

An unexpected ripple has been torn in their meticulously cultivated ghetto paradise, and I'm the mothafuckin' pebble.

The reading room for suckas," Dr. Tennessee says. "The back stacks where all the good shit hiding.

Maybe we're our own makers, no matter who put the parts together.

A corpuscule's like an empty body with an angry-ass spirit shoved in it. Rude as fuck thing to do to someone if you ask me.

And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us

We are entwined. I drew power from the spirits and spirit workers and I returned it to them tenfold. The true source of shadowshaper magic is in that connection, community, Sierra. We are interdependent.

The sky grows dark over the city as Janey tells me her story. Teh beast was supposed to help their community. Something that would look good in a brochure, I suppose. But instead, it cut loose, took out in to the Williamsburg night. Janey and the kids went after it , and when they finally caught up what does it do? The thing ate a hipster.

I love Carlos like the weird, half-dead son I never particularly wanted

Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.

Octavia and Walter and Junot were speaking a language I'd heard all around me on the street but never read on the page, certainly not in the context of stories about aliens, detectives, or supernerds. This was a new mythology; it was permission. I'd always known I could get lost in a book; now I knew I could be found in one too. I

Fighters ahead," Taka warned. "Look sharp."
"I always look sharp," Lando chuckled.

that true sheet-grabbing throb that emanated from the sweat-soaked room on the third floor.

Her voice carried the voices of a hundred thousand souls in it; a whole history of resistance and rage moved with her.

A scar isn't about the injury, it's about the healing.

There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later.

Where's Bennie?" Nydia said. Bennie was Sierra's best friend, and it wasn't like her to miss a practice. "She at some Super Saiyan dorkmeister overnight camp upstate for the week," Sierra said. "Learning how to make robots or computers or planets or something.

What the fuck is that?" one of the cops yells. "I'm the magic Negro from all your worst nightmares," Cyrus laughs. "Now scatter!" He swirls his arms like he's gonna shoot a fireball at them and they take off, tearing through the ranks of NYCOD agents and disappearing around the corner. "I like this dude," Riley whispers. Cyrus

Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one.