There There Quotes

“They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies, they ripped them out of our bellies.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“The rolling head became confused and drunk. It wanted more. More of anything. More of everything.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“That need that won’t quit. That years-deep pit you were bound to dig, crawl into, struggle to get out of.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“grew up in Moraga, which is a suburb just on the other side of the Oakland hills—which makes me even more Oakland hills than the Oakland hills kids. So I grew up with money, a pool in the backyard, an overbearing mother, an absent father. I brought home outdated racist insults from school like it was the 1950s. All Mexican slurs, of course, since people where I grew up don’t know Natives still exist. That’s how much those Oakland hills separate us from Oakland. Those hills bend time.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“I don’t know what the fuck any of this is about.” “You’re not supposed to,” she said, and rolled down her window. It was getting hot. I rolled mine down too. “That’s the way this whole thing is set up,” she said. “You’re not ever supposed to know. Not all the way. That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can’t know. That’s what makes us keep going.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“lanes to pass a slow truck in the right lane. “Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We parked it at the Coliseum BART Station parking lot and walked back to Manny’s house high on having gotten away with it so easily. The system scared you so you thought you had to follow the rules, but we were learning that that shit was fucking flimsy. You could do what you could get away with. That’s where it was at.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“She’s listening to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” It’s her least-favorite Otis Redding song because it gets played too much. She shuffles her music and it lands on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” This song gives her that strange mix of sad and happy. Plus it’s upbeat. That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“We all been through a lot we don’t understand in a world made to either break us or make us so hard we can’t break even when it’s what we need most to do.” It”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it. Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“hadn’t grown up fat. Not overweight. Not obese, or plus-size, or whatever you can call it now without sounding politically incorrect, or insensitive, or unscientific. But I always felt fat. Did that somehow mean I was destined to one day be fat, or did my obsession with being fat even when I wasn’t lead to me eventually being fat? Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we paid too much attention to it with our worry? —”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“read that the brain stem is the basis of consciousness, and that the tongue correlates with the brain stem almost directly, and so eating is the most direct path to getting the feeling that you’re alive. This feeling or thought is interrupted by a craving for Pepsi.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“If I even remotely believed in any kind magic aside from the kind that led me to this very entry, and if I could somehow surgically remove the bezoar, I would make it into a talisman—granted the moon was in the corresponding position—and take care of my constipation while also possibly destroying my mom and Bill’s relationship.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“The Picatrix is a book of magic and astrology from the twelfth century originally written in Arabic and titled Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, meaning “The Goal of the Wise.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Now I don’t have any dreams, or if I dream, I dream of dark geometric shapes drifting noiselessly across a pink, black, and purple pixelated colorscape. Screen-saver dreams.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“life will break you. How that’s the reason we’re here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“can’t believe a bone can get so old it can shatter, break into tiny pieces in your body like glass. After she broke her hip, I started helping out more.”
― Tommy Orange, There There