Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display. — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they’ve been. If I see a city I… — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
“The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.” — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
I felt the unordinary romance of / women who love women for the first time. — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
“..would I have had a different life failing this embrace with broken things, iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks in the brain, would I… — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
“And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition - the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step… — Dionne Brand Copy Share
“Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She… — Dionne Brand Copy Share
“There were Italian neighbourhood and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable… — Dionne Brand Copy Share
“I run each morning, two, three, sometimes four kilometers. Part of March, all of April, all of May. I can’t run five. I am… — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image
“It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of… — Dionne Brand Copy Share Image