The Quarantine Tapes

“Privacy, intimacy, and democracy are not separate things. When we lose the capacity for privacy, we’re losing democracy and intimacy together and at the same time.”

“It’s about more than police brutality. It’s about the systems of oppression that will not leave us to be free, that we must rise up against in order to be free. This is the widest, largest, most incredible protest movement in US history and I absolutely think of it as a revolution.”

“It became almost like a national sport here to flatten the curve. Every day at two o’clock two doctors and one police officer, they gave press meetings on the television, and it was all about doing this together, coming together as a people to flatten the curve.”

“We felt that all children learned better when they were learning that there were many different kinds of people in the world and you get to go to school with lots of them. We were integrationists.”

“Suddenly we both went off of what I would call “traditional calendar time” and into something more like what I would call “kairos”, a non-calendar time, which in continental philosophy is thought of as the kind of event where...historical conditions have been shaped and made and irrevocably altered by something that has taken place that will fracture the calendar time. And it seems that that happened on May 25th.”

“Consider your life as an opportunity for multiple changes that can lead you into a direction and that can create adaptability, so that you can face the things that are hard to face.”

“It doesn’t work to pretend that those figures in history didn’t exist or that they didn’t leave their particular legacies behind them, but it also doesn’t work to leave them still on their pedestals, as if their historical position is unchanged. So, you need something that acknowledges the history, but shifts it.”

“At every major decision point in American life today, if there is a tension between what is good for money and what is good for people. What is good for money tends to win.”

“I ask questions relatively often in poems and I ask them because I don't know the answer.” - Elizabeth Alexander

“One way that I am looking at truth is that it’s a way of being asleep. As soon as something becomes true, there’s a way that I quit making inquiry or that I quit asking questions of it. Truth is also something that is gathered and then it becomes a power. When things become powers, solidified powers, that’s when I really question them.” - Natalie Diaz