I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. ... pain will always either change or stop. Always. ... The confidence that it will change is what makes bearing it possible. So pain is fluid. It is only when you conceive of it as something static that it is unbearable.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.