K > K's Quotes

“And, If I know anything at all/Its that a wall is just a wall/And nothing more at all/It can be broken down.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“The intentional act of loving other brown queers is about healing, in a world that says we are not worthy, that things like pleasure and care and security and unconditional love are not for us.”
― Mia McKenzie, Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender

“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The main reason is that the women of Combahee not only saw themselves as “radicals” but also considered themselves socialists. They were not acting or writing against Marxism, but, in their own words, they looked to “extend” Marxist analysis to incorporate an understanding of the oppression of Black women.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. How We Get Free (Kindle Locations 158-160). Haymarket Books.”
― Keeanaga-Yamahatta Taylor

“Letting down your guard can be really difficult, especially when you are black or brown and have been taught that letting down your guard is a sure way to not survive in a world that wants to kill you.”
― Mia McKenzie, Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender

“I'm not nostalgic. I'm looking back to mine the past for what it can help us with right now, and for what it can help us pass on and create. - Demita Frazier”
― Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

“I mean, to me, all the explanation that's needed is in the Combahee River Collective statement, about what it is we stand for, and who we think we should be working with. But as I have explained, the reason we used the term "identity politics" is that we were asserting at a time when Black women had no voice. -Barbara Smith”
― Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

“[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“And I believe that a lost ship/steered by tired, seasick sailors/can still be guided home/to port”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
― Audre Lorde

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
― Audre Lorde

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.”
― Audre Lorde

“I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.

.”
― Angela Davis

“We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for.”
― Zoé Samudzi, As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

“In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.”
― Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“I am the history of the rejection of who I am”
― June Jordan

“To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.”
― June Jordan

“If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.”
― June Jordan

“Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.”
― Ling Ma, Severance