“Living is not living when I am living without you.”

I want to separate writing from heartbreak but I don’t know how.

This brown body is not an explosion- it is light and honey.

Your heartbeat is a holy thing.

How do you mourn the loss of someone who was never yours to begin with?

I want to be something to pray for but I don’t know how to be.

And what am I but the smallest of footnotes in the universe’s everlasting memoir?

This country collects too many tongues, until our only language is silence.

I don’t know how to let you out without destroying us both.

Seek refuge in the space between my bones.

Somewhere inside my throat lives your ache.

I like to trace the ghosts of your fingers on the back of my hand. They read- I don’t know how to hold without you.

I pocket grief and it beckons me like a lover.

My silhouette is an ocean, your lips a sailor.

There is a calmness in not knowing.

Every beauty mark, a country to roam. Every stretch mark, a river to cross.

I loved you in quiet because to hide is to pretend that it is okay.

I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.

Memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for.

Each others’ lives are our best textbooks.

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

Even after his death, Tupac is as powerful as he was when he was living.