“Someone asked me recently, “Do you get sick of people asking you about your hair?” And the reason I don’t is because I actually feel like you could chronicle my journey of self-acceptance through my journey with my hair. It’s a badge of something bigger.”

Sometime in my second year at Brown [University], I took an acting class. And the lightbulb went off for me. I fell in love with it. I realized that everything I was afraid of about myself, all my fears, could be used in that world.

My mom helped me. I was very shy growing up, but my shyness sort of manifested in a big personality.

This woman [Bow] was not simply a reflection of who her husband was. She was her own whole self. And even if we weren’t exploring life through her eyes, when we did see her it was clear that she had a full life.

Differences in experience, points of view and opinions aren’t what pulls us apart. It’s what pulls us together.

I am learning every day to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me.

There is a way to be a woman, ask for what we deserve and be able to negotiate.

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it’s as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

My bathroom is filled with hair and makeup stuff and I play with it all the time. What the real lesson is, is that you can own your own sense of beauty. It doesn’t have to be something you get from somewhere else.

[Black-ish creator] Kenya Bariss wrote on Girlfriends. We’ve been friendly since then. He sent me [the pilot] and said, “I wrote it for you.” But I know what that means in this industry.

I have to take some time to dream some new dreams. I feel like there’s a treasure hunt in front of me. A treasure hunt that is speckled with and seeded by a deep-rooted wild freedom.

Why am I beating my hair up? Because I want it to look like something that it isn’t? These are questions that I’ve been pondering my whole life.

Wisdom means to choose now what will make sense later.

I want to be awake. I want to choose kindness, live & let live. I want joy, gratitude, and peace today.

I think television is doing a better job than films in terms of representing people, but television is still not diverse.

My mom didn’t adhere to any of those typical rules. She woke us up for school every morning, and was there at dinner or would call at bedtime. She never left for longer than a week. She recorded while we were sleeping.

If I’m going to show cleavage or chest then I don’t show leg. I show one thing. If I show leg then everything else is covered up.

You really just want to know that somebody loves you for you. Sometimes you feel like an ATM machine with a wig on it.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

I’ve still got a brilliant head of hair, which refuses to lay down.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

I started a grease fire at McDonald’s – threw a match in the cook’s hair.

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest.

Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.