Kiese Laymon Quotes

America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.

I learned you haven't read anything if you've only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.

And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry.

the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together.

Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren't writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.

Most groups of men I knew were good at destroying women and girls who would do everything not to destroy them.

I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.

Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That’s why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world.

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.

People always say change takes time. It's true, but really it's people who change people, and then those people have to decide if they really want to stay the new people that they're changed into.

This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we've been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.

Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can swim either.

Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn't survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.

It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.

My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.

And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folk watched black folk watch us watch him.

For a few seconds, I remembered that the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together. I remember that it was easier to promise than it was to reckon or change.

We black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom.

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.

The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.

But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you.

We all broken, I said. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we're gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it's possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.

I knew the big boys would tell stories about what happened in Daryl’s bedroom that were good for all three of them and sad for her in three vastly different ways.

Even when I know you're lying to me, I just feel crazy sorry for you. Why? Because I can just tell you'll never let me carry what you're hiding.

I will not misdirect or manipulate human beings...especially those human beings who love me enough to risk being misdirected or manipulated. I will not misdirect or manipulate myself...I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful. I will not give my blessings away. I will love myself enough to be honest when I fail at loving.

Your heart was good but you forgot to guard it. You killed yourself slowly because of this. The heart is the true measure of a man or woman. I loved you and I know that you knew I loved you. We all have addictions. Some are just more obvious to the eye. We are all dying, but we are all living.

The violent white backlash to Obama’s victory will still be unlike anything we’d ever seen...

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

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.

Both of y’all knew, and showed me, how we didn’t even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us to.

Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.

It all felt like love until it didn't. Then it felt like dying.

It ain't about making white folk feel what you feel," she said. "It's about not feeling what they want you to feel.

Y'all taught me that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.

We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.

Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get you hell.

If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans could be, black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.

I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms.

Do you ever just feel lonely? I feel like I walk around the world raw, Kie. It's hard to open up when you're already open, and people just never get tired of sticking their nasty hands into that raw.

I'd never imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it. I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.

You took my paper smudged with tears and you read it out loud. You told me what worked in the essay, and what didn’t work. You asked me questions about word choice, pacing, and something you called political symbolism. You asked me what I was really trying to say with the essay and suggested I start with saying exactly that. You challenged me to use the rest of the essay to discover ideas and questions I didn’t already know and feel. “A good question anchored in real curiosity is much more important than a cliché or forced metaphor,” you told me.

Back then I wanted all my seasons to be Mississippi seasons, no matter how strange, hot, or terrifying. Now I felt something else. I didn’t want to float in, under, and around all the orange-red stars in our galaxy if our galaxy was Mississippi. I wanted to look at Mississippi from other stars and I didn’t ever want to come home again.

Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more.

For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.

The last time Shalaya Crump and I really talked, she told me, "City, I could love you if you helped me change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.

4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover. True/False

The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.

I am vulnerable, but not powerless.

The land, Kie,” she said. “We work too hard on this land to run. Some of us, we believe the land will one day be free.

I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read a lie. I wrote this to you instead.

He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.

I pledge to never be passive, patriotic, or grateful in the face of American abuse.

I'd fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I'd fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.

Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have paid more than their fair share, and our nation owes them and their children, and their children's children, a lifetime of healthy choices and second chances. That would be responsible.

Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we're gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it's possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.

I never heard the words, "sexual violence" or "violent sex" or "sexual abuse" from one family member, one teacher, or one preacher but my body knew sexual violence and violent sex were as wrong as anything police or white folk could do to us.

Serious love. We need what Jesus called neighbor love. We need what Martin Luther King, Jr., called redemptive love. We need what Toni Morrison called self love. We need what bell hooks called committed love. We need what Kiese Laymon calls responsible love.

when you get saved, act like you got some sense. You hear me? Whole lotta folks get saved and it take them an entire life before they start living by God’s word. That’s them ol’ deathbed conversioners, them ol’ heathens trying to get to heaven a lifetime too late.

Dave, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie, was a felon because he was black, scared, desperate, and guilty. My student Cole, a heroin user and dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, is a college student because he's white, wealthy, scared, desperate, and guilty.

In her own way, she was as compassionate and thoughtful as a girl could be, but her mind was stronger than yours and no one could ever really break her heart. You could sprain her heart, and her heart would bruise a lot, but it could never ever be broken. Never. I figured that there were probably 27 people like that in the world at one time and they were the only people who should be running for president of anything that mattered.

I would learn fifteen years too late that asking for consent, granting consent, surviving sexual violence, being called a good dude, and never initiating sexual relationships did not incubate me from being emotionally abusive. Consent meant little to nothing if it was not fully informed. What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. Lying there on that floor, I accepted that I’d actually never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads.

Before both of us went to sleep, I asked Grandmama if 218 pounds was too fat for twelve years old. “What you weighing yourself for anyway?” she asked me. “Two hundred eighteen pounds is just right, Kie. It’s just heavy enough.” “Heavy enough for what?” “Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for.

They're sleepwalking... Someone--Kiese Laymon, I think--said most white people are sleepwalking when it comes to racism in America. They don't see it so they think it doesn't exist anymore. Forcing them to see that it is happening here, now, is like waking up a sleepwalker. They get disoriented. Angry at you instead of about the racism itself.

I loved our style of flying.

The worst of me wants credit for intending to do right by Jermaine, and has no intentions of disrupting my life for the needs of a cousin I always looked up to.

Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

To white folk and the police, you will always be huge no matter how skinny you are. Get a grip.

You made me feel like the most beautiful black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn't.

There was no wealth in our family, you told me more than once. There were only paydays.

Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn’t in the gym to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat I looked and felt.

remembered forgiving you when Grandmama told me you beat me so much because something in Jackson was beating you.

Some days the tears just be pouring out my eyes, but Grandmama and is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn't see me as somebody worth respecting

Don't be good," you said across the space between us, "Be perfect. Be fantastic".

You know that it’s time to stop letting your anger and hate [...] be more important than the art of being human and healthy

It’s hard to open up when you’re already open, and people just never get tired of sticking their nasty hands into that raw.

gorge. I will want to punish my black body because fetishizing and punishing black bodies are what we are trained to do well in America. I will write. I will revise.

I loved all my teachers, and I wanted all my teachers to love us. I knew they weren’t being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish. But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them how to respect where we’d been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.

learned indirectly from you that we cannot responsibly love anyone, and especially not black children in America, if we insist on making a practice of hiding and running from ourselves.

Really, we're fighting because she raised me to never forget I was born on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the King's English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students, and, most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, the worst of white folks will do anything to get you.

If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.

Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain't no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

I asked Grandmama why she whupped me on my legs when I was doing quick feet, and not my head or my neck or my back like you would. “Because I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I want you to act like you got good sense but I don’t ever want to hurt you.

I don’t know if we somehow got stuck in a dumb book or movie. Right now, I feel like we supposed to say, ‘Golly, let’s go save the grandfathers we never knew.’ But like you always say, life ain’t no book. This is real life. In real life, do we really need our granddaddies?

This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been, which means no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—wants to be free.

I didn’t understand hell, partially because I didn’t believe any place could be hotter than Mississippi in August. But I understood feeling good. I did not feel good at Concord Missionary Baptist church. I felt good watching Grandmama and her friends love each other during Home Mission.

This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.

In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than.

Your gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision are why I started this book thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. In spite of those gifts, or maybe because of those gifts, it’s important for me to accept, that like all American children, I’ve been brutally dishonest with you. And like all American parents, you’ve been brutally dishonest with me.

This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?

I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I've done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.

I think of my grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.

On the way home, I wanted to ask you if we were deserving of different kinds of liberation, different modes of memory, different policy, different practices, and different relationships to honesty. I wanted to ask you if we were also deserving of different books. I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.

But the Bible was better than those other spinach-colored Classic books that spent most of their time flossing with long sentences about pastures and fake sunsets and white dudes named Spencer. I didn't hate on spinach, fake sunsets, or white dudes named Spencer, but you could just tell that whoever wrote the sentences in those books never imagined they'd be read by Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, my cousins, or anyone I'd ever met.

But i am a black man whose black mama's body and spirit were terrorized by another black man's hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Hetero-sexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution.

For a few seconds, I remembered that the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together. I remembered that it was easier to promise than it was to reckon or change. But I wanted to continue feeling delivered. I wanted to continue feeling fantastic. I wanted t continue feeling free. And I wanted to feel loved by both of us again. "I promise," I slowly texted. "We have come too far to turn back. I promise. We have come way too far to turn back.

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.

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.