A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
Category Archive: April 26
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents’ then-illegal and interracial marriage.
For a long time, I’ve been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language.
I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn’t write a good poem… And then it actually wasn’t so bad.
My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he’d tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
There’s nothing so kingly as kindness, and nothing so royal as truth.
Writing ‘Native Guard,’ I didn’t know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.