It's so funny the world we live in now. The years where you are most fertile, those are also the fertile years for career and personal growth. And so you're not encouraged to get pregnant in your 20s. But the 30s are when the biology kind of has you by the ovaries, so to speak.

Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt.

Women of color, particularly Black girls from economically challenged strati, we are told from the minute you start showing signs of being able to be impregnated: Don't get pregnant. You can't have sex because you might get pregnant. You can't wear short shorts because you might get pregnant. Don't talk to boys because you might get pregnant.

Hungry people make the best revolutionaries. Because when you're hungry, it's easy to get angry about things that aren't right.

I want to go down in history in a chapter marked miscellaneous because the writers could find no other way to categorize me In this world where classification is key I want to erase the straight lines So I can be me

There are those nights where you are just so emotionally present that you crack yourself open. And it works. And on the nights when you don't have it in you because you're tired or you've got no voice, you still are able to do your job and tell the story that people have come to hear.

What's surprising to me now is that now that I'm talking to a lot of women about this, so many women are doing this. Straight women, lesbian women, bisexual women, poor women, White women, immigrant women. This does not affect one group.