Ophelia

“Language is a living being that grows and dies. It can be healthy, sick, nurtured, or malnourished. It all depends on those using it. Just as in you are what you eat, it is even more precise to say you are what you say, what you read, and what you write…language can turn into a prison or a set of wings that can help us fly. It all depends on how we use it to challenge, expand, and question every single word we utter or write. Language is the beginning and the end of what makes us human. The language we do remains alive way after we depart this world. Language is in our mothers’ first lullaby, the first time we tell someone ‘I love you’, and we often talk about the significance of someone’s last words before they died. Therefore, we cannot decolonize anything, least of all knowledge production, if we do not examine why we say the things we say and how we get to internalize and express the things that shape our lives. In fact, language is truly the only home that remains even in exile when all else is lost.”
― Louis Yako

“The silence was no longer an uncomfortable enemy to me. Empty words were.”
― Ivy Oakes, What if Stars Don't Die

“When you can no longer count the peaceful moments in your day, and life becomes a wonderful place of clear thoughts and calm. You know things are as right as they should be.”
― Ron Baratono

“I can weave thousands of words into moving syntax and powerful prose. But if I lay the pen down at the close of the final sentence, and if in doing so I myself have not acted on the words that I have woven, it would have been better had I said nothing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough