Leang Ngov > Leang's Quotes

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“Our melanin will always make us marvelous...
Just imagine what that sea of sisterhood would look like. Magic!”
― Alexandra Elle

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
― Warsan Shire

“give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”
― Warsan Shire

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
― Warsan Shire

“To my daughter I will say, when the men come, set yourself on fire.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“The ego hurts you like this: you become obsessed with the one person who does not love you. blind to the rest who do.”
― Warsan Shire

“Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.

As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
They said she reminded them of the war.

On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope
and smoke it over burning frankincense.

You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty.

You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?

What man wants to lay down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?

Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things

but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.”
― Warsan Shire

“You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“Perhaps, the problem is not the intensity of your love, but the quality of the people you are loving.”
― Warsan Shire

“We emotionally manipulated each other until we thought it was love.”
― Warsan Shire

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head