Kazim Ali Quotes & Sayings

The whole world, as we're coming to understand, is quivering in its place. — Kazim Ali

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. — Kazim Ali

What I'm interested in is the exploration of the body and desire as a self-actualising or fulfilling component on the individual's life journey instead of as a part of the social, political, or economic structure of a "society" or "civilization." In this sense all desire is queer desire because it moves against these mechanisms of control. The hard part, the painful part, is for us ourselves to learn how to love one another, have affection for one another, support and be kind to one another. You can spend a life learning how to do it properly. — Kazim Ali

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

God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...]

I learned God's true language is only silence and breath. — 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. — Kazim Ali