Darnell Lamont Walker Quotes

I will help build your museum
When you run out of space to hang your work
You can hang your work in mine

Past relationships are nothing more than a collection of songs you can no longer listen to.

Too bad children don't know how profound their thoughts are.

Sanity and sense becomes a prison.

When it's quiet, I can hear the voices of those who took comfort under my skin when I could not.

Everyone gets broken. Everyone. Some grow stronger in those breaks. Others never recover.

As long as I don't give you a reason to love me, you shouldn't.

Who told these people with dreams, goals and ambitions they could take time off?

It was once necessary to go from somebody to nothing to become everything.

She's lazy, so i'm not sure when she had time to build that wall she has surrounding her.

Police are killing black men. Mona Scott-Young is killing black women.

Seemingly suicidal, it's not. I never wanted to live. I wanted to be happy. Living was always accidental.

Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren't doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they're contagious. They are, I believe.

The oppressor is never as free as they think they are

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

I wish I didn't need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.

You can't fight and claim you want to be free from the oppressor while still holding tight to things the oppressor gave you.

She left, never to return. I planted a tree and a seed each time I thought of her. I grew a small forest and a large garden and had no one to give the orchids to.

I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music.

If you're calling for peace, I am not home.

If you teach your children how to bully, or do nothing to stop them, teach them also how to die for their cause.

My ideas fuck like rabbits.

I'm silent when there is a war inside me. There's a need to keep the people outside intact.

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

Because when the night gets here, I'll be the youngest I'll ever be again, so I will laugh and celebrate relative youth.

If you're not seeing God at the climax, it's not worth doing. Sex is the bridge that connects heaven and earth.

We find our own truth serums. we confess willingly, but only if we are able to blame it on something or someone else.

If I told you just how much I need you, would you stay?

Even the Us's are Them's.

After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I'm gonna tell her it's too hot for it, knowing she'll say it's for the plane and ask what if the room gets cold?

Relationships fail often because some of us are too afraid to go naked. Not literally, but with out these costumes we made.

There's an inexplicable joy that exists on a brown child's face and in the way they navigate their world long before they discover they're hated.

I say fuck marriage, but we can do it for these westerners and explain it to the gods later.

If you had the option to pray for me or fight with me, you better choose the fight.

What if "redemption" means not only freeing yourself from what you've done, but also from what's been done to you?

This letter isn't to mark any significant point in your life or mine. This letter is Just Because ... Just Because.

You have to have a view of something," she said. "Otherwise you'll believe yourself to be a god, not knowing there are a million other things out there bigger than you.

Fall in love for as long as you can with the one who sees you when you are invisible.

We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don't want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.

Some days I feel like I will die for them. Some days, with them.

America. Where property damage is a greater offense than genocide.

America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.

They became better women for leaving.

They made you speak about god in the third person

Drugs are the gateway drug

I need my eulogy to look better than my resume. I'm living for that.

Definitions only belong to those who need them.

Eventually, you get tired of seeing mediocre talent succeed, so you work as hard as they do.

But you have to sacrifice yourself for YOURSELF, too.

Beautiful breezes in ugly parts of town give hope to those who want to be free.

The hate people hold on to for so long is what keeps them from feeling the pain they're most afraid of. deal with it. grow.

Racism in impenetrable. Staying in America means always fighting. For our own sanity and safety, we must go.

Come. when i finish writing, let's take a drive up the PCH with a bottle of cheap wine and talk about these lives we built

Hater" and "hate" are used when no critical thought can be formed. We can definitely do better.

I didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then.

I've never believed in anything or anybody that needed constant praise.

We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes].

Anyone and anything can survive the daylight. It's night that's the hardest to live.

I hope god isn't always watching - there are a few things i want to surprise him with - you being one of them.

The relationship was perfect, but I hated everything about the person I became.

I have to believe in reincarnation. believing that I'll be in one place forever is a hell in itself.

If you are not brave, say you are, then be it.

They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.

Gonna pretend to be a deaf mute who knows no sign one day, meet a woman, and we'll write for the rest of our lives.

No where in 'humpty dumpty' did it say he was an egg. Maybe your inability to think outside of what others have taught you is what's keeping you from putting him together again.

You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.

And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.

To Those Who Follow Me Around Whispering, "You're Just A Man" When I Feel Like God

The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I'm almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won't make it out.

In her attempt to make me a good man, I made her a bad woman.

Some men will take you to the movies. Some will take you to the mountaintop.

They tell you the story of Job so often to remind you when you lose it all, stay calm. I've always refused it. I hated the story. It made no sense, and then I developed the belief that religion's only purpose is to keep the poor from murdering the rich. And then I found the most dangerous folks are those who have nothing to lose, and I put it all together.

You asked me to be an open book. As I've already told you, I am. Anything you need to know about me can be found. Don't confuse me, a paperback, with a book on tape.

Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also.

Scar tissue is what remains when the wound heals. they never tell you that. reminders, they are. those sons of bitches.

We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren't sure if we were in love anymore.

We're looking at the coming of spring like we look at the coming of babies we never considered aborting; Hopeful.

I don't need you, but the world, sometimes, seems more peaceful and manageable when holding someone.

How necessary Sundays have become. I reach for them like sleeping lovers on the other side of my earth or my mattress.

Sex separation in the classroom leads to a bullshit socio-economic situation perpetuated by people with good intentions.

The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company's mission

I wanted to badly to be vulnerable over a burger, beer, and bags of free books we find on some stranger's porch. You wanted badly to be touched some thousand miles away and never found the time to write me back.

When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.

Because you thought love was just gonna be there. You weren't taught that it had to be made, it had to be mixed, kneaded, recycled. Over and over, you have to keep creating it. Over and over with everyone you love. Over and over.

Your dreams are so far outside of your comfort zone, you've convinced yourself you don't dream at all.

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we'd meet there again.

I don't believe in sin. My relationships that failed have failed because I somehow attract devout christians. I don't believe in virtue either. I think people just do shit and it's life.

Communities that can't read and translate what the powers are putting out will always be tricked.

I spent four minutes yesterday looking for the halfway point between where I am & where I want to be. I found the city - you just have to tell me if you want pizza, coffee or strange street meat. Just four minutes searching, but all day (really all week), I've been thinking of this letter & you.

There's a small window of opportunity to apologize sometimes after you've terribly wronged someone. It closes. Sometimes forever, but it never opens wide enough again for a good breeze.

Always be you! Just never think you can always be you without consequence.

When i'm out and it's autumn, my thank you's to the universe seem infinite.

I have friends who know everything there is to know about life except how to enjoy it

If you give up on your dreams, let that crush you and destroy you, even if just a little, if your children are watching. Otherwise, when you're telling them that they must pursue theirs, they will look at you and say "you didn't and you're doing just fine.

My favorite hobby is cooking and eating. There is nothing i can do well if i have not eaten well.

A seat at the table is desired. But I'll scream from the street if I need to.

One day we fall in love with the one who makes us live intensely and laugh hard and heavy. And as hard as we love them, their friend loves us back equally and we just can't be.

What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too.

The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.