Adrienne Maree Brown Quotes (1978-)

“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.”

“Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that we've had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasn't stopped rape. It hasn't stopped robberies. It hasn't stopped drugs. It hasn't stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because we've never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny.”

“so much has changed there because of the work of Octavia Butler, because of the work of Nnedi Okorafor, because of the work of Tananarive Due.”

“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?”

“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.”

“I got to be in a conversation with Angela Davis, and she was like, Yeah, we dealt with a lot of the same stuff, but now y’all know how to take care of each other and take of yourselves. And there’s just more tools.”

“Favianna Rodriguez is one of the first people I met who brought up sex in a public context with no attempt at mass seduction. She was incredibly matter-of-fact about her truth that, as an artist, as an organizer, her pleasure and her freedom are part of her larger radical creative path.”

“I’m obsessed with Harriet Tubman. I’m obsessed with, what was it like to walk in her shoes and to face her fears? So I always want to reach back and be like, OK, well, now what is the Harriet Tubman activity to do, in this time? And what is Harriet Tubman up to in 2063? — because there’s always someplace that needs justice and liberation.”

“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.”

“The question, which is actually from one of my teachers, Grace Lee Boggs, that she would always ask when we showed up to sit down and talk with her is, What time is it on the clock of the world? And I like this question. It always makes me kind of deconstruct time, when I’m like, oh, we’re in these looping patterns, actually. And we’re in a pattern that feels familiar in these ways and new in these other ways.”

““What a time to be alive,” adrienne maree brown has written. “Right now we are in a fast river together — every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.” adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.””