Joy Kogawa Quotes & Sayings

Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles. Just a glimpse of a worn-out patchwork quilt and the old question comes thudding out of the night again like a great moth. Why did my mother not return? After all these years, I find myself wondering, but with the dullness of expecting no response. — Joy Kogawa

People who talk a lot about their victimization make me uncomfortable. It's as if they use their suffering as weapons or badges of some kind. — Joy Kogawa

In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust. — Joy Kogawa

Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power. — Joy Kogawa

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire. — Joy Kogawa

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. — Joy Kogawa

Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?"
"The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back — Joy Kogawa

Language to me is a tool a very clumsy tool. And words are garden tools with which to till the soil of one's life. — Joy Kogawa

Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"-love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread. — Joy Kogawa

Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene. — Joy Kogawa

From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain. — Joy Kogawa