Ibi Kaslik Quotes

Heart lesson #3: post-heartbreak survival.
The heart is resilient, I mean literally. When a body is burned, the heart is the last organ to oxidize. While the rest of the body can catch flame like a polyester sheet on campfire, it takes hours to burn the heart to ash. My dear sister, a near-perfect organ! Solid, inflammable. ~ Ibi Kaslik

Love is not popular. Not noble ... not love, no reward. Trust love. Is not love. Trust yourself. ~ Ibi Kaslik

Sometimes it sucks, being good, because if you make a mistake then everybody makes a mistake and if something goes wrong it's your fault, it falls on your shoulders. ~ Ibi Kaslik

It's what everyone wants when they're breaking someone's heart: to be rid of the person and yet absolved of guilt, of the unhappiness they've caused. They want their rationalizations heard and gulped up by the wronged, and they want their victims to go away, peacefully. To never be haunted again. ~ Ibi Kaslik

You can never get to a person's mind. You cannot know the different deeds and missions of happiness; you can't tell a screm of pleasure from one of pain. Sometimes, we can barely read pain. Neither a barometer nor a guide, pain can mislead us. Even in the body, the laws of chain reactions can be false. This is why people always want a second opinion. ~ Ibi Kaslik

We're not gonna throw away the past as if it meant nothing. See? That's what happens to whole neighborhoods. We built something, it was messy, but we're not gonna throw it away. ~ Ibi Zoboi

We fold our immigrant selves into this veneer of what we think is African American girlhood. The result is more jagged than smooth. This tension between our inherited identities and our newly adopted selves filters into our relationships with other girls and the boys we love, and how we interact with the broken places around us. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Ubi amo, ibi patria. Where I love. there is my home. ~ Elizabeth Hunter

Because the thing about sharp corners is, the right turns can bring you back home. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Sometimes love is not enough to keep a community together. There needs to be something more tangible, like fair housing, opportunities, and access to resources. Lifeboats and lifelines are not supposed to just be a way for us to get out. They should be ways to let us stay in and survive. And thrive. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Don't give me no 'but you're beautiful on the inside' bullshit."

"No, you are beautiful on the outside," I say.

"Don't give me that bullshit either. I'm beautiful when I say I'm beautiful. Let me own that shit," she says. Her eyes have not left the computer screen this whole time, but I know she's paying attention to everything I say.

"Okay, then you are ugly."

"Thanks for being honest."

"Seriously. That's what we say in Haiti. 'Nou led, men nou la.' We are ugly, but we are here."

"We are ugly, but we are here," she says, almost whispering. "I hear that. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Late June in Brooklyn is like the very beginning of a party-when the music is really good, but you know that it's about to get way better, so you just do a little two-step before the real turn-up starts. ~ Ibi Zoboi

If hot red is for anger and rage, pink is the color of a soft burning – hot enough to light up the dark corners of sadness and grief, but cool enough to be tender, innocent, open. ~ Ibi Zoboi

...as long as you have a bougie heart, you can aim for the finer things in life. ~ Ibi Zoboi

We were too heavy. Not with our bags. Not with our bodies. But with our burdens. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Even as you kept telling me that I'm becoming a woman, you never let me go out into the world to be free. ~ Ibi Zoboi

We have to become everything that we want. Consume it. Like our lwas. ~ Ibi Zoboi

When you remember all the ways you been killed, and how that shit hurt your fucking soul, ain't no way in hell you could shake that off. So I didn't give a fuck about nothing. ~ Ibi Zoboi

We have more space and less time. And the love we had for our whole neighborhood now only fits into this wood-frame house in the middle of a quiet block. We don't know the people who live across the street or on either side of us. ~ Ibi Zoboi

A greater subject fitteth Faustus' wit: Bid Economy10 farewell, and11 Galen come, Seeing, Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus: Be a physician, Faustus; heap up gold, And be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure: Summum bonum medicinae sanitas, The end of physic is our body's health. ~ Christopher Marlowe

My first meal in America is one that I make for myself and eat by myself. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come. ~ Ibi Zoboi

si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi
[if you should be in Rome, live in the Roman manner; if you should be elsewhere, live as they do there] ~ Ambrose Of Milan

Then Washbourg gave his iphone to Ibi as he walked up to the severed head, grinned, and said "Watch this." Then, he proceeded to kick the severed head 30 yards to his left between two camels and shouted "Goal! ~ Mark Wilkins

Death parked itself on that corner of American and Joy, some days as still as stone, other days singing cautionary songs and delivering telltale riddles, waiting for the day when one girl would ask to open the gates to the other side. ~ Ibi Zoboi

I dreamed of going to the most remote places on this earth to dig for old bones, older than people. Before humans and their stupid ideas. Before hate. Maybe even before love, too. Dinosaurs just existed. No lectures, no books, no language. No world-conquering Europeans and no defeated everybody else. Just those powerful, unrestrained creatures roaming the planet. ~ Ibi Zoboi