Kei Miller Quotes & Sayings

How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word
for it -- at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers. — Kei Miller

After all, don't care how you want to sit there and deny the knowledge of River Mumma sitting on her rock - don't care how you deny the knowledge of fallen angels who can jump into your body as they please, or the knowledge of ancestors who sit beside your bed and watch when they not harkening on to the sounds of drumming - don't care how you deny any of it, all of it is still true. All of them things still exist, because them do not need the permission of your belief. — Kei Miller

Know then that every heartbless
given is collected by Jah like mickle and muckle,
or like a basketful of cocoa, and comes back to you
like a dividend. — Kei Miller

Maybe you shake your head, but let me learn a lesson right now: plenty knowledge is in this world. Enough knowledge that you can pick and refuse. And if you want, you can refuse to know plenty things, don't care how true those things be. I know things you does not know, and things you will never know. And it is sake of that - sake of this knowledge - that people have looked on me and called me old fool or crazy. They treat me like I is retarded. Imagine that. I is the idiot because I know what they don't know. — Kei Miller

She knew that for people to be people, they had to believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it, for once you believed in something, in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you. — Kei Miller

Know this,
that lions who trod don't worry bout reaching Zion. In time
is Zion that reach to the lions. — Kei Miller

To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab. — Kei Miller

This place was no freedom, and Massa Day was not done. Massa had only changed his name. He was no longer "Busha" or "Buckra" or "Massa". He was now "Boss" or "Miss" or "Sergeant." Sometimes Massa even changed his skin from white to black, making this whole freedom thing complicated. There was further to go; a longer journey ahead. — Kei Miller

a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing
and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight. — Kei Miller

Maybe sometimes you have to tell a story crossways, because to tell it straight would ongly [sic] mean that it go straight by the person's ears who it intend for. For consider the words of Jesus when the blessed Savior go up on the mountain him did decide to speak in parables. He never just tell them that all of them was heathens, and that not a one of them could reach Heaven without him. Instead he talk bout hard ground and soft ground and ground that was full of macka and thorns; . . . him talk bout a lost sheep who finally make him way home. And maybe it afterwards, when you gather all of these crossway stories, and you put them together, that you finally see a line had been running through all of them. Sometimes you have to tell a story the way you dream a dream, and everyone know that dreams don't walk straight." (251) — Kei Miller