The Gilda Stories

I think the most important thing for you to do in the meantime is live. It is a very involving job, which takes much concentration and practice.

It's not an unkind thing to make a new home. And it will be one where all whom you love are welcomed.

What began with fury has become a decades long pursuit in search of meaningful responses to these political and philosophical questions: What is family? How do we live inside our power and at the same time act responsibly? How do we build community? How do we connect authentically across gender, ethnicity, and class lines?

Pledge yourself to pursue only life, never bitterness or cruelty.

Life was indeed interminable. The inattention of her contemporaries to some mortal questions, like race, didn’t suit her. She didn’t believe a past could, or should, be so easily discarded

Stop trying to make the perfect move; trust your instincts more. You’ve been through quite a bit in the past years. I’m sure you’re as good a student as you’ve always been.” “I can’t be a student for all my time!” “We are students for all our time if we’re lucky enough to know it.

I hoped that reading the novel would give my mother a sense that my life as a queer black feminist is about something more than my choice of partners. It is also about a relationship to time and people and shared space.

this moment past peak oil, a large percentage of blockbuster movies are apocalyptic; superheroes are in vogue. What does the black imagination have to offer to the survival of human life on planet earth?

We remain because this our home. We both have lost land here. Should we leave it all to them? I will not.

The answer is greed. We are dying of greed. I don’t know the cure for that.

When this happens, when you must protect yourself or those in your care, the real sin would be in taking life easily. The only way to maintain any humanity is to remember the faces of those who’ve died. To carry them within ourselves so that whatever good might have remained in their spirits has someplace to dwell. You cannot kill, then forget their faces without forgetting some part of yourself.

Ghouls, perhaps. Some here are certainly that. What else can we call one who thrives on ripping out another’s throat, or on deceiving people into ruin or servitude. I would say they are ghouls.

You must look to me and know who I am and if the life I offer is the life you choose. In choosing you must pledge yourself to pursue only life, never bitterness or cruelty.

Gilda was no longer fleeing for her life.

A repeating refrain I wrote for Bones & Ash, the theatrical adaptation of this novel, is the spine upon which the story rests: “We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange.” In order to answer any of the questions the book raises we must take blood—metaphorically speaking. That is, we must learn how to break through the surface, find the deep dangerous place where blood flows without hurting one other, and share all that we know and love in order to survive.

Do you think you and Sorel will be together forever?” “Of course. Either in each other’s company, as we are now, or separate and in each other’s world. One takes on others as family and continually reshapes that meaning—family—but you do not break blood ties. We may not wish to live together at all times, but we will always be with each other.

We have life, but this does not mean we are better people. In fact, we must struggle even more than mortals do to remain good. How easy it is for goodness to have no meaning when punishment, retribution- or hell- have no meaning. It makes as much sense for Eleanor to choose thrill-seeking or Samuel to choose murder as it does for you and me to choose love and family.