"How much of human life is lost in waiting?"

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

(via In Your Afterglow)

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

--James Baldwin

(via In Community and Resistance)

"With you, intimacy colours my voice. Even 'hello' sounds like 'come here.'"

--Warsan Shire

(via HappinessRuns...) 

"We all have a blind spot around our privileges shaped exactly like us.
And I’m telling you guys, we’re never fucking going to get anywhere as long as our economies of attraction continue to resemble more or less the economies of attraction of white supremacy. Finding people who practice decolonial love is as hard inside of a vast movement as it is outside. The actual standard of decolonial love, how little discussed, how little understood, and yet in many ways is the great test of who we are and of our praxis and of our communal praxis."

--Junot Díaz, Keynote Speech at Facing Race 2012

(via Tudo Bom(b))

I have as many speeches from this conference as are available on YouTube queued on my Watch Later list. Expect way more quotes at some future point.

"The important thing is that we cease treating sex as something shameful, and an aspect of life separate from all the rest. We need to make decisions about sex and evaluate them in the same framework which we use to judge worth of our other capacities, be they our intelligence, intuitions, physical stamina or prowess, or other special talents."

--Lester A. Kirkendall, Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships (1961)

(via WYSIWYG)

It's an Audre Lorde kind of day.

*Correction: Every day is an Audre Lorde kind of day.

"Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying."

--Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

(via WYSIWYG)

"To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition."

--Jawaharlal Nehru

(via WYSIWYG) 

All of this.

"I want to talk about intimacy. I want to talk about desire. I want to talk about fucking. I want to talk about touch.

I want to talk about how Black and Brown bodies are denied these things. I want to talk about how Black and Brown bodies thirst for these things. I want to talk about how Whiteness constructs Black and Brown bodies in opposition to these things.

I want to talk about how Black and Brown bodies are rejected by other Black and Brown bodies. I want to talk about how we can't always find comfort in each other because we're so busy finding comfort in Whiteness.

I want to talk about how Black and Brown bodies tear themselves apart for these things. I want to talk about how Black and Brown bodies struggle for these things. I want to talk about how it's never enough.

I want to talk about intimacy. I want to talk about desire. I want to talk about fucking. I want to talk about touch."

--$Store Glitter Lion

(via come correct)

"The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit."

--Dwight Morrow

(via HappinessRuns...)

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can call all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us  temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

--Audre Lorde

(via Sister Outsider) 

If it remains a mark of our oppression that as black people we cannot be dedicated to truth in our lives without putting ourselves at risk, then it is a mark of our resistance, our commitment to liberation, when we claim the right to speak the truth of our reality anyway.

--bell hooks

(via In Community and Resistance)

On the capitalism of friendship

"Whereas closed romantic relationships are mutual slavery, in friendship a free capitalism reigns. Favors are exchanged for favors. Secrets are exchanged for secrets. Balance must be guarded tightly, lest suspicion arise. Your time and resources limit the amount of friendship you may buy from the market of human relations; you may only have a few deep relations or several more superficial ones. If you become closer with somebody in particular, other relations immediately suffer. Most of the time, there is someone more important for you than you are for her, and vice versa.

"Often friendship relations are hierarchical--you have a best friend, second best friend, and so on. Different social hierarchies also penetrate these relations...Friendship is a continuous battlefield, where you must earn your place...You must earn your friends every day, and you may lose your social status overnight...With time, these relations become more stable, but low-intensity warfare does not mean peace...Loneliness means that you have been defeated in the war of human relations. You have put too much of yourself in one or two main relationships that failed...

"...We who desire the end of capitalism often fail to see how deeply its model of action is embedded into human society. There is no fundamental difference between that and an exchange that involves money and barter. If friendship and love is about barter as well, what hope is there to get rid of capitalism?"

--Antti R., Letters IV

(via come correct)

Relevant to my life for two separate points:

A) Because EY and I always tease JA about being a bad friendship investment. (She's not. She's just electronic-forms-of-communication-challenged.)

B) Because there are a couple of friendships in my life that I feel...off-balance in right now, like one side or the other is giving or taking too much, like we're struggling to find a middle ground at which to happily meet. There are other relationships I want to do more to cultivate into a fullness they're currently lacking. Yeah, friendship is probably capitalism, but if we're not getting out what we're putting in, then capitalism is hurting us as much here as it does anywhere else.

"No one wants to be the person who is made fun of for caring too much about something, who treats in earnest a situation that everyone else considers absurd. Even in personal relationships, feeling too heavily invested while simultaneously understanding that the other person couldn’t be more detached is one of the most profound feelings of embarrassment we can experience. Because it isn’t simply the embarrassment of making a mistake or a poor choice, it’s a shame over the kind of human being you are and how you see the world around you. To be shamed for your sincerity is to be reminded that you are dependent on something which is not dependent on you — that you are, once again, vulnerable."

--Chelsea Fagan 

(via Lavender Labia)

""I taste her and realize I have been starving."

--Jodi Picoult

Reason Joe Biden is infinitely better than Paul Ryan #94873049730497

"Look, guys. No matter what a girl does, no matter how she's dressed, no matter how much she's had to drink, it's never, never, never, never, never okay to touch her without her consent. That doesn't make you a man--it makes you a coward."

--Joe Biden

(via Lavender Labia) 

She's a bitch but also a BAMF...

"The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it."

--Toni Morrison

(via sex is not the enemy)

"You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it."

--Audre Lorde

(via Sister Outsider) 

"If your success is defined as being well-adjusted to injustice and well-adapted to indifference, then we don't want successful leaders. We want great leaders who love the people enough and respect the people enough to be unbought, unbound, unafraid, and unintimidated to tell the truth."

--Cornel West

(via Happiness Runs...) 

As we've discussed, I love Cornel West. I vehemently disagree with a lot of his current political opinions right now, though, and that's fine. I can do both. If we couldn't love that which we find problematic, we would be either loveless or ignorant. 

I think Barack is that leader. That's what my absentee ballot that went out in today's mail says, and I hope it's what you'll say sometime between now and Tuesday too.

"We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of black women for each other."

--Audre Lorde

(via come correct)