"This is a place where an entire race has oppressed and sat above the rest. On this land, the blood-spills always bubble back up to the surface, and instead of cleaning it, the oppressors constantly cover it with cement."
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"This is a place where an entire race has oppressed and sat above the rest. On this land, the blood-spills always bubble back up to the surface, and instead of cleaning it, the oppressors constantly cover it with cement."
"Who are you being strong for? Which was really 'who are you enduring pain for?' It's been for everyone else but me. If I've endured it, it's because I didn't want to be a bother. Didn't want to disappoint. I used to think strength was about proving proving all the things I could do, but maybe it's also about voicing the things I can't. Saying I don't want this. For myself and my own body."
"Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to live it."
"I don't know what will be left of me if love and grief can't bring you back to life. Maybe I need to be brought back to life, too."
"Trusting him was like keeping a great white shark as a pet."
"Being gay isn't something I was able to choose. To be happy, to get out bed every morning, to be strong and brave and proud of who I am, sure. Those were choices."
"Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what-not who-you are. The story looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.....But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two."
"I think about how many Black spirits have been killed by white supremacy and lies. How many of us were experiments. Worthless bodies in some game "
"My impulse is to the good, my good is to serve myself. I am not a people, I am not a nation. I only wish from time to time to make my actions be the actions of a people, to make my actions be the actions of a nation."
"...I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are nervous free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that made this mess."
"I wonder if the first language you learn in life will always be the language of your deepest feelings, even if you learn other languages."
"No more secrets. The longer they're kept, the more hurt they cause when they're set free."
"The Blackness between the stars is the melanin in your skin. I read it in a book. I take it to mean that as Black folks we are limitless. That, maybe, our blackness holds our dreams, not just churches and Bibles?"
"I saw the gap between the world as it was, and the world as it should be. That gap was a wound. Suffering flowed from it...It was a lesion that has been opened on this continent in the days of the conquistadors..."
"What if making it happens every day. To each of us. Differently."
"It's refreshing to speak with someone who not only relates to my experience but also doesn't think the way I respond to it is entirely flawed. Protecting yourself from hurt doesn't mean you're broken. It means you're human...Every person has to decide whether to lower their shield and when."
