Zami Quotes

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.

It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home

To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.

I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.

I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.

Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.

It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.

In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single-sub-society--black or gay--I felt I didn't have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look "nice". To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn't realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough.We were different. Being black together was not enough. We were different. Being black women together was not enough. We were different. Being black dykes together was not enough. We were different.