9 Quotes by Kenji Yoshino

He said: “You are my son.” And I began to sob. Perhaps this is the worst any closet does to us – it prevents us from hearing the words “I love you.” These were words my parents said to me, and I trusted the love, but not the “you.” The real me was hidden, so the “you” they loved was some other, better son. But when my father claimed me – This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine – I began to suspect that no matter what I was, he would be next to me, the silent economist stroking my hair.

One reason current discussions of justice are so impoverished is that our heterogeneous society does not have many shared texts. Shakespeare's plays are among the few secular texts that remain common enough and complex enough to sustain these conversation. His answers to our dilemmas may not "bear on all points." Yet they teach us not to underestimate the action of the flower.

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

Perhaps none of us assumes romantic love to be a birthright. Yet the confidence it will come surely admits of degrees. Growing up, I assumed I was the word that rhymed with none other – like “silver” or “orange,” glistering bright, but sonnet foiling, and always solitary traveling. Somewhere love happened, plausible as a catch of distant conversation. But not in the self’s way.

What is needed is not sight, but insight – I need to look at your visual “impairment” and infer that my own impairment might be the same or worse.

One reason current discussions of justice are so impoverished is that our heterogeneous society does not have many shared texts. Shakespeare’s plays are among the few secular texts that remain common enough and complex enough to sustain these conversation. His answers to our dilemmas may not “bear on all points.” Yet they teach us not to underestimate the action of the flower.

These are only words, not incisions or shocks, so their violence may be harder to see... a man’s wrist lifts as he pours water from a pitcher, making it seem as if water, wrist, world, exist so this angle can be. A parallelogram of moonlight reads the bumps on his back as he sleeps in my arms. When I fix on these images, I know that to transform the desire they embody into loathing would be a violence as sure as a knife across a painting.

No one has written adequately of what happens when enough of the body’s naked surface is pressed against another human being’s. It is a slow dismantling of ego, a suspension of the instinct to distinguish Me from Not Me.

I remember a biology lab in which we observed a spear-headed water worm. Like a starfish, it could grow back anything we razored off of it, even to the point of generating multiple versions of itself. I saw myself in that gliding shape. Arrow-shaped, it never arrived where it wanted to go. But it knew, when cut, to grow.