Neek Brown

“Being happy doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten what you’ve lost. Grief doesn’t work that way, Sloane. Human emotion is more complex than feeling one thing at a time, and happiness doesn’t erase grief, it enhances it. It makes the knowledge of what you’ve lost more acute, but it also makes it possible for you to open yourself up again, to make room for what you’ve lost to come back to you in a different way.”
― J.L. Seegars, Restore Me

“So, I gave him pieces of me but kept just enough of myself to not go missing. I’d been there and done that before. Have you ever felt empty because you filled a nigga’s cup, and all he did was pour yours out? Yeah… that’s where I had been. It was a shitty place, and I vowed to never go back there. To never let a man, no matter how much I loved him, deplete me.”
― BriAnn Danae, F**king Under The Mistletoe

“It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn’t even southern? That a Black child didn’t have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they’d never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois