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“The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: ‘economic inequality,’ ‘housing discrimination,’ ‘sexual violence,’ ‘mass incarceration,’ ‘homophobia,’ ’empire,’ ‘mass eviction,’ ‘post traumatic stress disorder,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘neo-confederacy,’ ‘mental health,’ or ‘parental abuse,’ yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 114)
“You hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you. God gives us five sense for a reason. You hear me? Use them. Stop hunting for distractions. Stop taking your own legs out. It’s enough mess out there trying to beat us down without you helping.”
Kiese Laymon’s Grandmother, Heavy (Page 114)
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“She had blue skin,
Shel Silverstein, Everything On It
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by—
And never knew.”
“I share with painters the desire
Nikki Giovanni, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
To put a three-dimensional picture
On a One-dimensional surface.”
“The truth was that practicing writing meant practicing sitting down, sitting still, and my body did not ever want to be still. When it had to be still, all it wanted to do was imagine dunking with two hands or kissing a girl who loved me. Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
“A lot of what disturbs us from our tranquility is not literal noise. It’s not the pinging of our phone. It’s when we pull up our phone and see what other people are doing, when we have that FOMO or jealousy or we feel inadequate that we’re not accomplishing or achieving the way they are. Because what we’re forgetting is the path that we’re on, we forget what we’re trying to do, we forget what’s important to us.”
Ryan Holiday
“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 26)“‘I think I want to lose weight. Can you help me? I be sweating too much when I try to talk to people I don’t want to be sweaty around.’
‘You mean girls, Kie?’
‘I guess I mean girls.’
‘If someone doesn’t like you for you,’ you said, ‘they are not worth sweating around. Save your sweat for someone who values it.'”
“Some days, the tears just be pouring out my eyes, Kie. But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either. But I am okay. You hear me?”
Kiese Laymon’s Grandmother, Heavy (Page 8)
“You slept on a slender pallet that night in Vegas. I was supposed to be sleeping next to you but I couldn’t because I was so happy. Your snores reminded me that you were alive. If you were alive and next to me, I had everything in the world I could ever want.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 3)