12 Quotes by Danzy Senna

I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.

My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I’d dream about these details, these objects and people and places I’d left behind, and I’d wake up crying.