Luster Raven Leilani Quotes

I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.

I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible.

It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.

I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it

I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don't. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born to die.

I’m good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad.

He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.

Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news.

I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.

I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and that despite the roaches and the instant oatmeal and the bruise on your face, you are still luckier than they have ever been, such that losing a bottom-tier job in publishing is not only ridiculous but offensive.

I hate the idea that I have repeated an action, that he has looked at me, discerned a pattern, and silently decided whether it is something he can bear to see again.

She tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves.

I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.

I feel bad that my first instinct is to manage his feelings, instead of suggesting somewhere else to go. That we will both have to endure my attempt to prove over the course of this date that I am Having a Good Time! and that This Is Not Your Fault!

This is my home, Akila says, and I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible,

Suddenly it feels painful to be this ordinary.

I understand that I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.

All I want is for him to have what he wants. I want to be uncomplicated and undemanding. I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am. I want all that and I want none of it.

If I'm honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

And then I miscalculated. Too much anger shared too soon. Too much can you believe these white people. Too much fuck the police. We both graduated from the school of Twice as Good for Half as Much, but I’m sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission. She still rearranges herself, waiting to be chosen. And she will be. Because it is an art—to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.

... I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.

Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.

So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

Because in an hour, a man without a brain will be a man who looks like he can dream.

God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.

In my few years of dating, I have received a number of gifts from men. Gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets.

A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes.

We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.

As a rule, I try to avoid popping that dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl a white man dates. I cannot endure the nervous renditions of backpacker rap, the conspicuous effort to be colloquial, or the smugness of pink men in kente cloth.

found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes.

thought

A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.

A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.

killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be black.

Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt.

Even if I have done the adequate mental jujitsu to convince myself that I appear like a normal human being, a trip to the bathroom to regroup can on occasion turn into the kind of fun-house voodoo that happens in DMV photos and long exposures of Victorian children. There is something about looking into someone else’s mirror, something that always gives me more information than I need.

and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.

Maybe she is too much like me, too much like my mother, teetering silently on some horrific precipice in her teenage years until she comes out the other side as the woman I couldn’t be, a woman with good credit and hope and who is terrifying in her conviction to be whatever it is she wants to be.

She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she's seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find it is pristine.

She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she’s seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find that it is pristine.

Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone.

Interesting,’ I say. Of course, it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn’t considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we’re alike. He has no idea how hard I’m trying.

I'm good but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news. Still, I can't help feeling that in the closest arm of the multiverse, there is a version of me that is fatter and happier, smiling in my studio, paint behind my ears.

Trinidadian men do not just have eyelashes for days, they have something more subliminal that does not make itself known to you until it is nuclear and you are stuck with eleven kids in Jamaica, Queens, while he is tickling ivories for a traveling circus.

Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope,

I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge.

They start out with a few compliments, which I receive readily. Yes, I’ve whipped the digital archive into shape. Yes, I delivered on the K–5 Maya Angelou and Frida Kahlo biographies, wherein the sexual assault and bus accident were omitted per a Provo parents group who weren’t ready for their kids to see the blood women wade through to create art.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.

There are times I interact with kids and recall my abortion fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a child who is clearly a drag.

In a way, that makes my dreams delirious expressions of thirst - long stretches of yellow desert, cathedrals hemmed in dripping moss.

I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.

Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve

and I stand before the mirror. I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.

collects polymer toys, and does Groening-esque renditions of The Dream

more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. But everything is different IRL.

And she will be. Because it is an art—to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.

It occurs to me that maybe he is not interesting and is just older than me, someone who has blown through his budget for failure and landed on the other side with a 401(k).

I think I see Eric on the other side of the room but it is just a lamp.

When my father was a soldier, his prefrontal cortex wasn’t yet complete. He could not grow a full mustache, and when he came back home he had a cane and a DIY tattoo of a woman’s name.

I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things—factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don’t want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can’t pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me.

I put on a complex pair of underwear that is not so much underwear as a bundle of string, and I stand before the mirror. I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.

During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice. I was not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen.

And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here

so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch

He follows me on Instagram and leaves lengthy comments on my posts. Retired internet slang interspersed with earnest remarks about how the light falls on my face. Compared to the inscrutable advances of younger men, it is a relief.

I feel boring for the compulsion to compare myself to her, and even a little mean, but her serenity bothers me. It bothers me that she doesn’t wear prettier underwear, that her marriage is inscrutable and involved, and that I am somewhere inside it.

Here’s a fact: I have great breasts, which have warped my spine. More facts: My salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk. It always goes well initially, but then I talk too explicitly about my ovarian torsion or my rent.

the debris around the drain not enough to deter me from lying down in the tub and being dramatic, humiliation being such that it sometimes requires a private performance, which I give myself, and emerge from the shower in the next stage of hurt feelings. For me, this is denial.

as I am coming to the end, there is a booth with the coolest prints I have ever seen. The artist, a very normal-looking Black woman in a wool sweater, looks up from her ice cream and tells me that her graphic novels are loosely based around her quest to find adequate psychotherapy.

In my sleep, Clark Kent arrives on the planet alone and falls into endless wealth, and across the country, a young Bruce Wayne is adopted by sweet, midwestern parents. There is no Batman, but there is still a Superman, a deadened Übermensch who imposes his idea of purity onto the earth.

All this time Eric hasn’t looked away from me, within his confusion a promise of retribution that I find thrilling—historically the sort of high sweetest at its inception, when a man’s wrath is just a consideration, when he curtails the impulse because he thinks he’s different while you know he is the same.

Somewhere in Essex County, Eric is in bed with his wife. It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.

I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape. A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes. So it has taken a long time for me to get here. To say, Yes, this is what happened. It happened just like that.

My roommate calls a meeting while I’m out falling from my bike into a customer’s cheesecake, and as soon as I climb the stairs she is there with a suitcase, saying she’s moving to a gut-renovated building in Harlem with her boyfriend as 'send me a picture of your pussy' pings onto my screen. As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

Grandma was a sheltered southern belle from Kentucky. The sort of high-yellow woman who believed her fair complexion was the result of an errant Native American gene, but who was, like so many of us, walking proof of American industry, the bolls and ships and casual sexual terrorism that put a little cream in the coffee and made her family loyal to the almighty paper bag.

I look out of the window and see her lugging a bag of mulch across the yard and I feel guilty all over again. Her chunky, tragic sneakers and freaky competence. The way the windows around the cul-de-sac are dark and she is the only person outside, already engaged enough in her task to be making a lot of supremely unsexy noise. It becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone.

I wanted to be more forward, to fold him into an easy, extroverted hug. But what happens is this limp handshake, this aversion of my eyes, this unsurprising and immediate surrender of power. And then the worst part of meeting a man in broad daylight, the part where you see him seeing you, deciding in this split second whether any future cunnilingus will be enthusiastic or perfunctory.

daisy in the barrel of a gun having nothing on the unnatural look of a soldier’s smile, the look of the incomplete synthesis of fight or flight and the limbic system when it cannot compute. My father only ever smiled like this, like every morning he had to put on his skin and adhere to a code of behavior he could no longer understand, a highly functioning collection of pathologies with shrapnel in his back.

Of course it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn't considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we're alike. He has no idea how hard I'm trying.

we start in earnest on a few G&Ts. It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

My love, this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification,” he says, and because it took him, on average, forty-three minutes to come, because I put on the ears and the tail and learned the lyrics to “Painting the Roses Red” backward and forward, because I drank approximately five gallons of cranberry juice over the course of our relationship, and for a day or two required the use of a cane, I take issue with his definition of instant.

She shows me the towels and suggests that I wash up. When I emerge from the shower, a dress is laid out on the bed, cornflower blue and immediately recognizable to me as something I would likely never be able to afford, a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep.

You think because you slack and express no impulse control that you’re like, black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you’re just exactly what they expect. Like, I understand wanting to resist their demands. But they can be mediocre. We can’t.” “Mediocre?” “I can’t be associated with it. Like, there is actually a brief window where they don’t know to what extent you’re black, and you have to get in there. You have to get in the room. And if I have to, I will shuck and jive until the room I’m in is at the top.

In the grocery store, there are only three other people, and one of them is a cashier. I pass a woman in the seafood section, and she smiles at me, but beneath her smile I see her wondering where everyone is. I feel our silliness, my reliance on the city’s density, which I have spent so much time hating but proves to be the last barrier between me and some inconceivable boss-level of concentrated loneliness. As I ladle the bisque into a cup, I try to focus solely on the soup and not on my teeth, my skin, and the gradual breakdown of my body into dust.

I look for my paints, and when I find them, they are mostly congealed. It has been two years since I painted anything, but I have optimistically kept a bag of art supplies on hand. There is a dead mouse in the bag, and I have no idea how long it’s been in there. Because for two years I have slowly moved all my art supplies out of view. I have woken up from dreams where my hands are slick with oil and turpentine and lost the inspiration by the time I brushed my teeth. The last time I painted, I was twenty-one. The president was Black. I had more serotonin and I was less afraid of men. Now the cyan and yellow come out hard. I need hot water to make them mix. I work with the paint, let the acrylic dry, and when it isn’t right I rework it again. I remain as faithful as I can to scale. I mix thirteen shades of green, five

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason