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Adrienne Maree Brown
63 quotes
“Writing fiction allows us to dream aloud, to dream onto pages that we hope others will read, and to craft worlds we hope others will visit. We are already dreaming beyond this current moment, these crises, these norms. Dreams are the foundation for what we attempt to turn into reality. Democracy was a dream (and some might argue it still is in most places, even for those who claim to be practicing it); the abolition of slavery was a dream (and some should argue it still is, while the prison industrial complex thrives); every garden we find nourishing was first a dream.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Forward to Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (2023)
“The work of decolonizing the future is the work of decolonizing our imaginations. We have to tell stories in which the protagonists are those whose stories are least often told, recentering our attention away from the elite, the celebrities, the influencers.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Forward to Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (2023)
“So much has changed there because of the work of Octavia, because of the work of Nnedi Okorafor, because of the work of Tananarive Due.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Democracy Now (2021)
“Afrofuturism, I will say, is a thrilling — to me, a thrilling arena. And now there’s African futurism. There’s Black speculative fiction. There’s all these arenas where, basically, Black people and people of African lineage are saying, “We were almost erased from the lineage. Right? People wanted to erase us and have us just be labor. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re creating stories that are rooted in African heritage and that articulate an African future.” So, it’s an exciting place. It’s an exciting arc to be inside of as a creator.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Democracy Now (2021)
“If we were able to unshackle our imaginations in this moment, I think our compatibility with the Earth would become possible.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I imagine the world in a right relationship, it's a love story between our species and this Earth and amongst us.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don't use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can't be in the same room. So, one of the things I think to strengthen that muscle is, first of all, reading. Reading visionary fiction, reading visionary texts. I often recommend Octavia Butler to people because it's reading things that are hard. Walidah Imarisha always says, "It's realistic and hard, but it's hopeful that change is possible." How do we be with what is and keep our eyes up?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stories I think we need to tell are ones of what it is like to be in a relationship with the Earth. What is it like to live on an abundant Earth? What are communities that are thriving by being in relationship to the Earth? What does enough feel like?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know that I'm not grieving because death is unnatural, I'm grieving because love has overfilled my banks, and I can no longer just pour it into this other person. When I'm angry, it's because I love something, and I want to defend it. When I am feeling fearful is because I love something.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want my lineage to be a lineage of someone who fought hard for human existence on this planet. My despair and grief and fear and anger informed that, and they're powerful parts of that fight, just as much as my love.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Organizing is a way of saying, We are going to put our hands directly on the future. But it’s also time-traveling backwards. So much of organizing is looking back at, what did our ancestors try? What did they learn? What were they up to?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life, it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can begin to see there are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat and they repeat, at every scale.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can we be honest — at least honest that there’s not love in the way we’re doing it now? Because I think that was also what was hurting my heart, was people being like, Yeah, we just have to love each other — and then we’re doing the most awful, awful dismissals and disposals of each other.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re losing leaders left and right, because people are making mistakes and now there’s no room for making mistakes.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Octavia Butler said that “[t]here’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We are in a time of new suns. We’re in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life moves towards life, you know. That’s the trick.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we're in this really important, beautiful phase where we're learning so much can happen even at a distance. But it's a double-edged sword because so much of what is happening is happening on platforms that were not necessarily designed for us to use them to foment change and to bring down systems of harm. They were designed to serve capitalism, which means they want as many clicks and likes and as much engagement as possible. And what gets a lot of engagement is drama.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“how do we start to retune our attention towards things that are solution-oriented, things that help us build? And this is a hard time for that. We've been immersed in a culture of destruction for such a long time.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm thinking about abolition all the time, trying to understand how we bring it to pass: How do we defund policing? How do we defund the prison system? How do we actually break those patterns in ourselves in order to break them in the larger world? So a lot of it for me is connected to that.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do we ensure that the survivors' needs are actually getting met? What would actually create the boundaries and the spaciousness that we're trying to give to survivors for their healing, while also helping the person who has created this offense to break the cycle of harm within them? And some of what seems to help is to have a sense that all of us get harmed, and all of us commit harms.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White supremacy has a certain view of who the villain is. Patriarchy has a certain view of who the villain is. Capitalism has a certain view of who the villain is. Ableism has a certain view of who the villain is. And throughout history, we have notoriously been wrong about who the villain actually is, or what concepts are actually villainous concepts to our species.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This pandemic has unveiled for a lot of us just how small our reliable communities are, and how much we need to deepen those relationships so that they can hold change and conflict and differences.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didn't rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think we're in a similar moment now. It's impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didn't have prisons.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we are very aware now that a ton of people who are in the prison industrial complex actually need mental health support.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that transformative justice is something that happens at an intimate level. It happens in a community that knows each other.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I look at my community: When is it my turn to mediate? When is it my turn to show up for someone who needs to get out of an abusive dynamic? When is it my turn to show up in community as someone who names that I have caused harm and takes accountability for something that I've done?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of my other teachers, Danielle Sered, said that no one experiences harm for the first time when they're doing harm. As a society, as a species, but specifically in our communities, we have to start asking ourselves those questions like, what caused this? Can we get to the root system?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each of us is going to have to start to say, in my own life, can I navigate and operate as if no one is disposable?”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to lift up the book Mutual Aid by Dean Spade”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think ultimately that mutual aid is going to teach us a ton about how to be in communities that can be accountable to each other, because mutual aid only works when you're able to say, "I have a need," [and someone else says] "I have something to offer to that need. Being in conflict is just another need.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(White supremacy) is a fundamentally mythological state. Human beings are not supreme to each other based on the vagina we came out of. That’s not what determines our worth and our well-being or miraculousness.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you are born into an abusive identity, there's another way possible. If you were shaped into being someone who is driven towards conflict, causing harm to other people, there's another way possible.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our world inspires a certain level of paranoia. Perhaps it is a measure of intelligence-after all, everyone is being watched and controlled within borders they didn't determine, exchanging paper someone else told us is valuable for things of actual value, living under a dangerous government since forever. These truths, along with the constant violence and death and ego-based conflict, can make it hard to relax, to rest and sustain ourselves in the longer arc of justice and transformation. ("weed on, weed off")”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that transformative justice is actually a crucial element in moving toward the kind of large-scale societal healing we need-transformative justice is a way we can begin to believe that the harm that has come to us won't keep happening, that we can uproot it, and that we can seed some new ways of being with each other.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that all organizing is science fiction-that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True pleasure-joy, happiness and satisfaction-has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopic present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives. Pleasure-embodied, connected pleasure-is one of the ways we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Find the pleasure path for your life and follow it. Let it reverberate healing back into your ancestors' wounds. Let it open you up and remind you that you are already whole. Let it shape a future where feeling good is the normal, primary experience of all beings.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to surrender so many wrong thoughts to begin to see.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remind myself I can't be good at something I'm doing for the first time, and that reminder helps me humble into learning mode.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My pleasure icons are... Marla Stewart of Velvet Lips. Rihanna, obviously. Lizzo too, the pleasure she gets from just confronting the world with her excellence and then laughing.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I appreciate the chaos of unplanned time. I find unorganized human time particularly intriguing.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m reading... Octavia, Ursula. Kiese Laymon. Mary Oliver. James Baldwin. China Mieville.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My most subversive joy is... that internal knowledge that I am not inferior to a man who is simultaneously thinking that he is superior to me.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science fiction is the perfect "exploring ground," as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs.”
Adrienne Maree Brown (born 1978) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source