1
The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.Cameron Conaway
2
A poet could kill the dead.Cameron Conaway
3
Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.Cameron Conaway
4
I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.Cameron Conaway
5
Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.Cameron Conaway
6
Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.Cameron Conaway
7
Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.Cameron Conaway
8
If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.Cameron Conaway
9
We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.Cameron Conaway
10
It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.Cameron Conaway
11
Fights begin and end with handshakes.Cameron Conaway
12
How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?Cameron Conaway
13
The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.Cameron Conaway
14
We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.Cameron Conaway
15
...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.Cameron Conaway
16
Unreality cooled reality’s burn.Cameron Conaway
17
I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.Cameron Conaway
18
My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.Cameron Conaway
19
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.Cameron Conaway
20
So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.Cameron Conaway
21
The historic beauty of BJJ rests not with its ability to allow a smaller man to maim a larger man, but with its ability to allow any man of any size to survive.Cameron Conaway
22
I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.Cameron Conaway
23
In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.Cameron Conaway
24
A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?Cameron Conaway
25
In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.Cameron Conaway
26
The storm before the calm.Cameron Conaway