“Brown girls are not band aids for your pain.”

These hands keep a score of everything.

I poured myself from an empty cup but you weren’t even thirsty.

I am just a bunch of bad decisions glued together.

You look most like your father when you smile. It’s your ultimate betrayal.

You are a multiple choice exam and I have circled all the wrong answers.

Heaven is not something you need to die to get to.

Black don’t crack: It does bruise, though. It does rupture into a new sky.

I wish I was as good at love as I am at falling apart.

I am always becoming a new tragedy. Trading one torture for another. Forever versatile in this becoming.

Shame is what happens when you learn self love through people who are difficult to forgive.

Sometimes I open my mouth and my mother comes out.

Its okay if all you did this year was survive.

Self Love is just me loving you in reverse.

The last person I adored made me cry and then tenderly wiped the tears off my face. It was the only lesson that taught me; you can love someone and still do horrible, cruel things to them.

We romanticize trauma so much that we have stopped trying to prevent it and started smiling at all the scars it leaves.

Healing can look a lot like violence.

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

Pain is inevitable, but at the same time setbacks are temporary as long as you don’t give up.

Take courage; pain’s extremity soon ends.

I did not have to read books to know that the theme of life is conflict and pain.

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us – of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.

Nothing forces us to know, What we do not want to know except pain.

For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one’s life.