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Inciting Joy: Essays

Ross Gay

Top 10 Best Quotes

“when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other’s unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we’re talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other.”

“that the practice of inquiry and unfixing is a practice of changing.”

“grief is the metabolization of change.”

“community-supported bewilderment, is the practice.”

“all the gestures these days that are more about laundering one’s image than changing one’s soul. All”

“What if wonder was the ground of our gathering?”

“The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.”

“The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”

“Or, as the writer Patrick Rosal might say: the grieving would be “an altar for listening to the beginning of the world.”

“Or we might draw dried flowers—still wrong-handed and quick—if we have them. Which makes us all commonly flustered and silly (and usually really gets us laughing). We might then exchange those drawings with a partner who will add captions, making a kind of lyric comic book, which makes us now collaborating (though listening to each other’s dreams and talking about what we love is collaboration as well, maybe even radical collaboration). This seems like something I probably got from Lynda Barry. There is a lot, so so much, to get from Lynda Barry.”

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