As you become an adult, shame gets introduced and reintroduced constantly to you. So where something that, to a child, just is what it is - you know, your father's violent but he loves you and that's just the way it is - later on you realize that this is like different, shameful, blah blah blah.

Justin Torres

Categorized in : Children Father Love You

Animals don't think in terms of victims and villains, or good and... by Justin Torres

Animals don't think in terms of victims and villains, or good and bad, or evil, or shame.

evil animal thinking

I don't think that any family has a function. I just think that a... by Justin Torres

I don't think that any family has a function. I just think that a family is. It just exists.

function thinking

Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult.

childhood emotional memories

What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.

sky clouds fall

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about how his own Paps, how he had beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.

cities beer men

I totally bristle against words like "dysfunction" or "abuse." by Justin Torres

I totally bristle against words like "dysfunction" or "abuse."

abuse dysfunction

Shame doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's a human conceptio... by Justin Torres

Shame doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's a human conception.

shame kingdoms animal

Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power.

rights baby men

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.

hitting littles animal