distant tenderness

“Once I got home, I didn’t start reading. I pretended that I didn’t have it, only so that later I could feel the shock of having it.“ - Clarice Lispector

“Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”

“I really can't go through anything serious ever again by myself.”

“Trust what is leaving. What is being shaken up. What is being set free. What paths are being cleared within you. Setting up for success is as important as welcoming it in once it gets here.”

                                                                                                                                            LaBohem Brown In a package of minutes there is this We. How beautiful. Merry foreigners in our morning, we laugh, we touch each other, are responsible props and posts. A physical light is in the room. Because the world is at the window we cannot wonder very long. You rise. Although genial, you are in yourself again. I observe your direct and respectable stride. You are direct and self-accepting as a lion in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean, remote. There is a moment in Camaraderie when interruption is not to be understood. I cannot bear an interruption. This is the shining joy; the time of not-to-end. On the street we smile. We go in different directions down the imperturbable street.

"One day in August, 1970, when both Jane and Henry were home, FBI agents came to the brownstone to question Jane as to her knowledge of the whereabouts of Angela Davis, the Black Panther, academic, and activist who was on the run after a fatal shooting and hostage incident during the trial of a Panther in Marin County. The guns used in the takeover of the courtroom had been registered to Davis, though she wasn't even in the courtroom at the time. Jane honestly didn't know where Davis was and she told the FBI agents this. But after they left, Henry Fonda was extremely upset. He told his daughter that she needed to move out of his house. She ended up renting her own apartment and a few weeks later she offered her new place up as the site for a press conference held by Panther, Huey Newton. Jane served drinks to the reporters and said nothing."

“To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself.”

“He later said that something about the look on her face—“eyes wide open, mouth wide open. . . She had that anger in her face that she was going to hit someone with that hammer”—caused him to fear for his safety. Fran Garrett later questioned the officer’s response: “What did the police see when they pried open that door? A Black woman? A lesbian? He said it was just a look on her face. What look would you have on your face if the police broke into your house? Could that have been the look of fear? I would have been in fear for my life too, especially if I already felt like they were going to kill me.” Once again, perceptions of Black women as “deranged subjects” prone to violence colored an officer’s response to a Black woman standing with a hammer, with deadly results.”

RIP Jeanne Moreau.