Michelle Cliff Famous Quotes
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Who can say how many lives have been saved by books?
Our lives are written in disappearing ink.
To cope with hurt and control my fears, I grew a thick skin. Oh, the many names of power - pride, arrogance, control. I am not the frozen snow queen but a flesh and blood woman with perhaps too loving a heart, one easily hurt.
Freedom without the means to be self-supporting is a one-armed triumph.
It was never a question of passing. It was a question of hiding. Behind Black and white perceptions of who we were
who they thought we were. Tropics. Plantations. Calypso. Cricket. We were the people with the musical voices and the coronation mugs on our parlor tables. I would be whatever figurine these foreign imaginations cared for me to be. It would be so simple to let others fill in for me. So easy to startle them with a flash of anger when their visions got out of hand
but never to sustain the anger for myself. It would be a life lived within myself. A life cut off. I know who I am but you will never know who I am. I may in fact lose touch with who I am.
In America: each year the day before school after summer vacation I sat on my bed touching my notebooks, pencils, ruler-holding the stern and sweet smelling brown oxfords in my lap and spreading my skirt and blouse and underwear and socks before me. My mother would come in and always say the same thing: "Free paper burn now."
Such words conspire to make a past.
Such words conjure a knowledge.
Such words make assimilation impossible. They stay with you for years. They puzzle but you sense a significance. I need these words.
Do you mind if I kiss you?" Morag asks, her Calvinist pallor giving way to high color, getting higher.
"Why?" I ask.
"I thought it might be fun," she says. "There's nobody about; our boys are away."
Has she made a presumption of unbridled sensuality as some do when they contemplate my tropical aspect? One
American boy, holding me too close, his body a monument to sweat, actually said, "Gee, I guess that means you can get into all those neat positions." Spoken with the logic of Cuvier contemplating the Venus Hottentot.
