Valarie Kaur Quotes

You don't need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.

You are a part of me I do not yet know

Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear.

I was beginning to learn that home is the space within us and between us where we feel safe—and brave. It is not a physical space as much as it is a field of being.

In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian supremacy, one an extension of the other. Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.

Love” is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

When we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.

When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.

The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference. Love engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. We cannot access the depth of loving ourselves or others without our rage.

When suffering constricts the heart, awe stretches it back out, making us more compassionate, more loving, more present.

Love is more than a rush of feeling. Love is sweet labor—fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving. A choice we make over and over again.

Every unjust social institution in history seemed permanent until it was imagined otherwise.

Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.

When we leave people alone with their pain, their alienation becomes the precondition for radicalization.

the purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding.

True understanding is not possible unless we risk changing our worldview. Otherwise we think we have built bridges to one another, but the bridges are rooted in sands that can shift with the tide.

Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person's story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person's view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it's okay if I don't feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, 'One trains one's imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?

Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace. Sometimes right relationship means reentering each other’s lives. Sometimes it means staying apart.

Unresolved grief inside a person is tragic; unresolved grief inside a nation is catastrophic.

Our lives are long and our circles are small. We remain linked to the ones we have loved, if only in our minds.

When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does the same, we attribute it to essence - Oh, that’s just how they are. We think of us as complex and multidimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one-dimensional … In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.

We can choose to remember that the goal of listening is not to feel empathy for our opponents, or validate their ideas, or even change their mind in the moment. Our goal is to understand them.

Can you choose one person to practice wondering about? Can you listen to the story they have to tell? If your fists tighten, or your heart beats fast, or if shame rises to your face, it’s okay. Breathe through it. Trust that you can. The heart is a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it becomes.

Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being. We birth the beloved community by becoming the beloved community.

No one should be asked to feel empathy or compassion for their oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.

America needs to reconcile with itself and do the work of apology: To say to indigenous, black, and brown people, we take full ownership for what we did. To say, we owe you everything. To say, we see how harm runs through generations. To say, we own this legacy and will not harm you again. To promise the non-repetition of harm would require nothing less than transitioning the nation as a whole. It would mean retiring the old narrative about who we are—a city on a hill—and embracing a new narrative of an America longing to be born, a nation whose promise lies in the future, a nation we can only realize by doing the labor: reckoning with the past, reconciling with ourselves, restructuring our institutions, and letting those who have been most harmed be the ones to lead us through the transition.

Our lives are long and our circles are small. We remain linked to the ones have loved, if only in our minds. The question is how to be in right relationship with them, even if we may never agree with each other, or even see each other again. Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace.

I think the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive. —James Baldwin

I thought of all of us who have been trained to suppress our rage—women, especially women of color. Rage is a healthy, normal, and necessary response to trauma. It is a rightful response to the social traumas of patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty. But we live in a culture that punishes us when we show our teeth—we are called hysterical when we raise our voice; we are less likely to be believed when we tell our story with fury; and, if we are anything other than deferential with an officer, we might get hurt or shot, and even then, our deference might not make a difference.

On the other side of rage awaits the ability to wonder again at the spinning world.

Love is not an exchange economy.

There is no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded.

Think of today as an entire lifetime," Wise Woman says to me before I fall asleep. "What was the hardest part in this lifetime? Notice where you sense that hardship in your body. How did you get through it?" We somehow managed to make it to the end of this day, the end of this lifetime. "What was the most joyful part of this lifetime?" Every day and every lifetime, no matter how hard, contains moments of joy. Notice what made it joyful. Sense what feels like joy in your body." "What are you most grateful for in this lifetime? Every day and every lifetime offers a new reason for gratitude. Sense that gratitude in your body." "Now, are you ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to think of the work you have done today and know that it was enough? Are you ready to behold everyone and everything you have ever known and loved, kiss them, and let them go? Are you ready to die a kind of death?" Each night, I die a kind of death. Each morning, I wake to the gift of a new lifetime. In between, I labor in love. It is enough.

Today I remember all that is beautiful and good and worth fighting for. Today I remember that the labor for justice has gone on for centuries before me and will go on for centuries after me. Today I remember that I am not alone - that if millions of women are listening to the wisdom within them too, and still choose to return to the work, then we will usher in a new era - where women are believed, where women lead.

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.

I realized what was stopping me: an inflated sense of self-importance. I was acting as though things would fall apart without me, that others could not do the work as well as I could. But, really, I was just terrified that I would no longer have worth if I shifted from doing to being. I had grown so accustomed to the breathlessness of crises that paying attention to my own breath in my body was the new frightening thing. It was time to find the bravery to surrender my ego and equip others to lead.

My mind had turned them into monsters—bad guys with infinite power over me. But there is no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded. These men had hurt me out of their own suffering. It was common, it was banal. When we cannot see that evil is driven by a person’s wounds, not their innate nature, we become terrified of each other. But the moment we see their wounds, they no longer have absolute power over us. I could not see the wound in them until I tended to the wound inside me. And that required me to access my rage.

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit... It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say: Tat tvam asi, 'I am that.' It is the African philosophy: Ubantu, 'I am because you are.' It is the Mayan precept: In La'Kech, 'You are my other me.

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say - as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.