“Her mother told her she could grow up to be anything she wanted be, so she grew up to become the strongest of the strong, the strangest of the strange, the wildest of the wild, the wolf leading wolves.”

They kept trying to make me less angry, but I refuse to surrender my rage.

It happens suddenly. One day, your parents don’t pick you up any more.

Stop looking for people who only want your beauty and turn away your chaos and darkness.

I know how to live with a blade and teach it not to make me bleed.

I am trying to stop being the ashes that you left behind.

We do not abandon those who truly accept us for who we are.

Womanhood is rich with unlearning. How to unlearn the way you hate your body.

You have to choose between freedom and comfort. You choose freedom. Of course you choose freedom.

I am so hungry for someone to love me.

And often when she finds herself missing him, missing the good moments with him, she whispers to herself, ‘The absence of you has taught me how to love myself. So thank you, my darling, my dearest.

We do not abandon those who truly accept us for who we are, and if you could save all the people who accepted you completely, wouldn’t you go back to save them too?

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.

My mom didn’t ever think I would take to acting because I was a very shy, very reserved kind of child. But obviously, something changed!

What makes Amma happy, is to see her children helping others to feel happy.

Lost journals are steps back home, like the mending of broken bones, like scars that act as patches to my soul, like the measurement marks on my mother’s wall that show just how much I’ve grown.

Hope… is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.

Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.

Patience is the mother of will.

She wouldn’t come back. She hated me. She hated Nan. She hated my mom. She hated her father. She wouldn’t come back here… but God, I wanted her to.

Though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtues.