“I think our culture promotes fear and shame.”

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.

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.

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.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.