“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.”

But I am both nightmare and sin.

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.

And power, power was so much more important than beauty ever could be.

Remind ourselves that grief may feel longer and more poignant than happiness but it still has an ending.

Perhaps he should have paid attention to the snakes coiled inside me waiting to strike.

It’s how I learn there are a multitude of ways to say I love you. For so many you don’t have to use words at all.

People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.

The most sacred duty, the supreme and urgent work, is to deliver humanity from the malediction of Cain – fratricidal war.

Here is my wish and my desire and my pledge as well: that we remember our true nature and our womanhood. That we own and know that we are more than our bodies and yet our bodies are these sacred, beautiful, rhythmic houses for us.

It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

I feel like it has been lost in R&B and a lot of people are scared to talk about their vulnerabilities and insecurities. They want to keep it up and in the club.

My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.

The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred.