Brendan Kiely Quotes

Nobody says the words anymore, but somehow the violence still remains.

The problem is that you don't always get to write your own story. You get written into some stories, and if ask why, there isn't an answer. You don't have any control, because the forces at work are too large to confront, and sometimes too large even to understand.

You think it's dumb when someone says there's no 'I' in team, but you stick one in there and you see how dumb that looks.

Fear. Like the way Ma told me to cross the street to the other side of the sidewalk if I was walking home alone and I saw a group of guys walking toward me. Guys. That wasn't the word she used. Thugs. Fear of thugs. Just like what some people were saying on the news. Rashad looked like a thug.

It was my hope for all of us that we’d each have someone again soon, someone to cling to, however briefly, to remind ourselves we were alive.

Fuck hope and despair. We live in a world of consequence and effect.

we live by the lies we believe

even in a room full of girls it was all about the guys.

When you drink alone over a long period of time, you’re not deluding yourself into thinking you’re clearheaded and bright. You’re falling apart, you know it, and you just want to slip away, numb as a snowman, melting until you’re gone.

So many times I had sought out his voice, listened to it with an eagerness, hope, and desire that I had called love, and still now, that thing that tugged me toward him must have been something like love, or what love leaves in its wake when it is gone.

But is that really compassion—to extend oneself to others with the assumption that that act will be rewarded? Isn’t the greater leap of faith the act of compassion in the face of nothingness? But who would do that? Who wouldn’t act solely in ways that are best for him or her when the veil has been thrown off and words like love and virtue are left naked in their hypocrisy?

There are times when we all want to tell ourselves, Look at that misfortune over there; thank God that isn’t happening here, to us, to me. You can ignore the bombs and the violence across the ocean until buildings are crumbling in your own country; you can dismiss the gossip about the neighbors across town as melodramatic, until those fists and the screams you’d heard about come barreling into your own home. Then what do you do?

Nobody ever said I don’t know or I’m afraid, and they acted like the masks they wore were their real faces and that they could sustain themselves forever on their own self-assurance—like they really believed they didn’t need anybody else. What was that John Donne poem we’d read in Weinstein’s class, “No Man Is An Island”? Not here. We were a goddamn social archipelago that called itself a community. Why did I feel like I was the only one who lived in a nightmare?

She held me, not like a lover but in a way we should all be held at least once in our lives—in a way that lets us know we are not alone. A human absolution.

I had to believe that when our bodies came together, it was a bridge to something deeper and more meaningful, a conjoining of parts to make a fuller whole, just as a breath is not only an inhale and an exhale but one act in which they complete each other. That was all I wanted: a sense of stability, of completeness, an assurance that any fear could be dissolved, that loneliness wasn’t a sickness cured when someone else’s exhale became my inhale and, together, neither of us could ever feel alone.

Isn’t it crazy to keep walking back in time and asking yourself to correct this choice and that choice? You could probably walk yourself all the way back to the beginning and say, Fuck it, why get involved with this mess in the first place—look what’s ahead?

I’ve always assumed other people have better ideas, that they do know what is best for me. It never occurred to me that they’re all just like me—they’re all pretending too. We’re all completely on our own.

I wondered if it didn’t all come down to something simpler: Are you the kind of person who is there for people when they need you, or not? Isn’t it in those moments when you have to work harder than you thought you could to reach out to another person, and you do, that you finally find the you who’s been hiding behind the mask all that time? Is it there, finally truly naked, and reaching for one another, that we create the chance to hold one another again? And what about the chance to love again? Do we get to create that possibility too?

But it was just me and the silence around me, and in that nothingness, I was afraid. I was terrified of other people and of my own damn self, and my fears were overwhelming, closing in on me like something near and breathing. Without my chemical surges, I didn’t know how I would stay focused and move beyond those fears.

[...] I thought about how a belief really begins. It doesn’t hit you like a lightning bolt, smack you off your horse, and fill you with visions of a world tinted with more vibrant colors. Instead, it begins with a desire to see something in that certain light, or to see the world in a certain way. The desire paves the way. It makes you believe the clouds are parting—and parting specifically for you. You need them to, because their doing so, just for you, gives you some incentive, some inspiration to keep going.

Mother always found the loose stitch that could reduce a priceless carpet to a pile of threads.

I feel like I’ve spent my whole life trying to please other people, trying to become who they want me to be, but it’s not like I have any other ideas. It’s not like they’re stopping me from being the someone I want to be. There is no someone I want to be—isn’t that weird?

I didn’t want to think about sex—that could come later. All I wanted now was companionship. That was the real freedom. That was the only safety we could offer each other: what it really meant to love and live without a mask.

If you care about a person, my ex-girlfriend used to tell me, don't just tell her. Show her. Show up, listen and act so she knows you heard her. Seems so simple the way she put it, but it's never that simple.

Like this whole stupid paradise, this very good school is nothing but a fancy promise, a broken one, a big lie. And worse, that I'm actually part of it.

Ready to take on the world? I'd seen the motto when I visited the previous spring. Everybody at Fullbrook seemed like a genius to me, already worldy, already honing their special skill, building robots, singing arias, starting their own tech company. I wasn't ready to tie a tie. What did I do? I could stop a puck from passing between the pipes, but I had to make it all the way to winter before anyone would care about that.

Prepped. Now there was a familiar word at Fullbrook. Make sure you are prepped. Prep this, prep that. So much prep. Sometimes I wondered if "prepped" was actually the right word.

Most people don't get second chances. I wasn't sure I deserved one. I wasn't sure I even wanted one. But I got one: Fullbrook Academy. This is what I did with it.

I once heard another girl put it like this: this is a boys' school and they accept girls here too. At Fullbrook, they told us to be ready to take on the world, but then they told us to do it quietly. What if I wanted to be loud? What if I needed to be?

I'm fighting for breath and I all can do is look up and see the white flame of moonlight outlining each branch, every leaf. I'm in the dirt again, shoulder against the tree, the shock of air so cold it seizes my bones. I can still feel his grip on my arm as if he's still there, shackling me to the trunk with his hands and his weight, but he's not. He's gone.

I'm shaking, but it feels like this tree and the sky above that are shaking, that are blurry, unreal, no longer what they were. It's as if I'm naked, but I'm not. It's as if the ground is swinging up to slap me, but it's not. I collapse by the edge of the bluff. There are still voices in the woods behind me. Voices down along the far end of the bluff. Voices in the night air like invisible birds screeching in the wind.

I'm so close to the cliff edge, I could crawl forward and drop, crouch on one knee by the side of the pool like I did when I first learned to dive, but I'm hundreds of feet in the air and the voice tells me to back up. I obey. It tells me to stand and I use the tree to help me to my feet.

Run, it says again and I do, into the woods, down the far path, away from the party, away from the other voices, away from everyone. I know where I'm going, but I still feel lost. Alone. I just want to get home, though the word means nothing now. Just because I live there doesn't mean it's somewhere safe.

I wondered if anyone thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American.

I wondered if anybody thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American. That was bullshit. This was very American, goddamn All-America.

Entonces tiende los brazos y me atrae hacia ella, y al cabo de un momento nos estamos besando de verdad, ahí mismo, encima del capó de la Bombardera Azul, con el abuelo a pocos pasos de nosotros, lo que resulta temerario y a la vez fantástico, porque es poesía en las mejores acepciones de la palabra, con nosotros dos enseñándole el dedo medio al universo, en nuestra rebelión contra ellos, porque aunque al final nos ganen, al menos habremos tenido esto, nos habremos tenido a los dos, y aunque el universo no vaya a escucharnos por muy fuerte que gritemos, ni tampoco vaya a preocuparse, nosotros nos besamos y nos seguimos besando, y sabemos de este modo, aunque sea de forma muy breve, lo que significa estar vivos.

Le digo que hace apenas cinco días, en lo alto de una colina, Corrina y yo decidimos hacer este viaje juntos; que el alzhéimer del abuelo le está devorando el cerebro y los recuerdos, y que quiero llevarlo de vuelta a Ithaca por última vez, para que vea la iglesia donde se casó, antes de que la enfermedad le borre para siempre el recuerdo de la abuela; y que es muy injusto que suceda algo así en un mundo que te arrebata con tanta facilidad a tus seres queridos, porque de ese modo no sólo pierdes a las personas que amas, sino también sus recuerdos, como si nunca hubiesen existido.

¿Por qué decimos que alguien nos ha atrapado, cuando la sensación es mucho más de volar?

So now I have to ask myself: What other stories from my life do I need to see in this new light? How many other stories from my life have I told—ignoring race, ignoring my whiteness—that now need to be retold to include how my being white affects them?

The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.

The church bag had to be big enough to fit her Sunday service survival kit. Her Bible, some candy, and all the sins of our family.

I was marching...because some people had told me racism was a thing of the past, they'd told me not to get involved. But that was nuts. They were nuts. And more to the point- they'd all been white people. Well, guess what? I'm white too- and that's exactly why I was marching. I had to. Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who said, "Don't talk about it" were white. Well, stop lying. That's what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop denying. That's why I was marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! We had to stand up and say something about it too, because otherwise it was just like what one of those posters in the crowd outside school said: Our silence is another kind of violence.

THERE’S REALLY NO SUCH THING AS THE “VOICELESS.” THERE ARE ONLY THE DELIBERATELY SILENCED, OR THE PREFERABLY UNHEARD. —ARUNDHATI ROY