“Tell your daughters how you love your body. Tell them how they must love theirs.”

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated. It is your hardest days as much as your best days that help you grow. All of this is part of being human.

Knowledge after all is a dark art.

If two Gods can love each other with no objection from the divine or the universe, who are mortals to tell other mortals who they can and cannot love?

But I am both nightmare and sin.

If you think the value of a woman is only in the curve of her hips and the shape of her breasts, you do not understand how to read beneath her jagged lines, the sacred geometry that make up her glorious heart and her beautiful mind.

Lies are often truth-shaped. They’re only containers you must turn inside out and shake till the truth tumbles out, wide eyed and confused, blinking in a light it never thought it would see.

Sometimes, you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling.

Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours. Infuse modern love with the hues of older romance. An agency that offers something real in a world that was increasingly becoming plastic.

I used to only pick up a pen for myself but now I pick one up for you too. Is there such a thing as an unselfish love poem? I don’t know, but I’m trying.

You see, there can be no life without death.

I wonder how I have carried so many regrets without even realising they were there.

If we had no fears to master, how else would we grow?

Forgiveness is easier to give to others than to yourself. But I am slowly learning.

I don’t know how to love people well yet. But I know I can love you the way you deserve, if you let me.

Even with the antidepressants, the grief seeped through the dangerous cracks in the scaffolding holding me up.

Without heartache there are no lessons to gain.

Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

My kids are always like, ‘Why do people always want to take pictures with you?’ and I’m like, ‘Because I’m your Dada, and you’re my daughter. That’s why.’ It’s definitely mostly because of ‘Game of Thrones.’

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‘We’re black.

I’m a Batman fan from Day 1. My daughter’s favorite is Wonder Woman, and my son loves The Flash, Cyborg, and Superman.

Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.