Brass Jewelry Quotes

Words were magic. They healed me when I was sick, comforted me when I was scared, and guided me when I was lost and alone...When confused, I consulted the Qur'an through kheerah. When thirsty, I drank from the brass cup inscribed with the Throne Verse. If I lost something, I incanted the besmalah and I would find it. We hung calligraphy on the walls and wore jewelry with Islamic inscriptions. When we entered the house, we announced our arrival with "Salam" so that evil spirits would flee.

The underlying assumption of this system is that wealth, leisure, comfort, health, and a long life belonged by right only to the dominant minority; while hard work and constant deprivation and denial, a 'slaves' diet and an early death, became the lot of the mass of men. Once this division was established, is it any wonder that the dreams of the working classes throughout history, at least in those relatively happy periods when they dared to tell each other fairy stories, was a desire for idle days and for a surfeit of material goods? These desires were kept from an explosive eruption, perhaps, by the institution of occasional feasts and carnivals. But the dreams of an existence which counterfeited closely that of the ruling classes, as the brummagen jewelry worn by the poor in Victorian England imitated in brass the gold baubles of the upper classes, have remained alive from age to age: indeed they are still an active ingredient in the fantasy of effortless affluence that currently hovers like a pink smog over Megalopolis.

MEET ME AT AIRPORT TOMORROW MORNING AT SEVEN. JEWELRY IN BRASS CHEST EXAMINED. WE MUST LOCATE OWNER.

It was not altogether easy to be cordial and warm with this lawyer. She snapped and clicked. Heavy brass snap catch on handbag, heavy copper and brass jewelry that clattered, clump-heel shoes, and a huge silver ring with a horribly ugly African mask design, frowning eyebrows, hard voice: clack, clash, snap … In the second ten seconds, Haber suspected that the whole affair was indeed a mask, as the ring said: a lot of sound and fury signifying timidity. That, however, was none of his business. He would never know the woman behind the mask, and she did not matter, so long as he could make the right impression on Miss Lelache the lawyer.

My hair is dreadlocked and hangs down to the middle of my back. Several of the locs are jazzed up with gold strings, charms, and cowrie shells. I decorate my body heavily, choosing brightly colored clothes, adorning my ears and nose with many piercings, and draping my fingers and wrists with what some would consider an excess of brass and copper jewelry. I scent myself with frankincense and myrrh. People stare at me wherever I go. Significantly more in Janna, Sri Lanka, than in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. But no matter--I'm gonna give them something worth looking at. I'm only here for a small amount of time. So I insist on taking up space in the world, in rooms, in my life, and in my relationships. I wouldn't have it any other way. I am here. This is my body. It is the place I live and also the place where I will die.