Joy Kogawa Famous Quotes
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Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.
we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".
Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?"
"The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back
Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.
Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"-love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread.
Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.
From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain.
Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky.
