CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian > CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian's Quotes

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“one thing I don’t need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don’t know what to do wit em
they don’t open doors
or bring the sun back
they don’t make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry.”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“i found god in myself
and i loved her
i loved her fiercely”
― Ntozake Shange

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can Ease one life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”
― Warsan Shire

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
― Kathy Acker

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“The world is full of seemingly nice guys who assault women. Guys who don't have healthy attitudes about women and sex in general, who see sex as something they are entitled to, who hurt women and don't even know they are doing it because we don't educate our young men on how not to become rapists.”
― Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time