7 Quotes by Kazim Ali

We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn’t feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.

Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.

To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.

In the one place everyone looks like me--has my name--i am the most foreign.

I was already too afraid to say anything.I can't even properly say my own name,

That's what I would say about poetry and prayer. That god or audience--the intended direction of both of those--we wish and wish are real.

The whole world, as we’re coming to understand, is quivering in its place.