Jenn Pickens

“We 'die' in the course of our lives many times, through failure of nerve or failing to live in some other sense; yet we get another chance to make our lives good.”
― Shakespeare

“In moments of insecurity and crisis, shoulds and oughts don’t really help; they just increase the shame, guilt, pressure, and likelihood of backsliding. It’s the deep yeses that carry us through. It’s that deeper something we are strongly for that allows us to wait it out. It’s someone in whom we absolutely believe and to whom we commit. In plain language, love wins out over guilt any day. It is sad that we settle for the short-run effectiveness of shaming people instead of the long-term life benefits of true transformation.”
― Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

“It’s said that ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is this: a vine that sneaks up a tree, killing not by poison, but by blocking out its light.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“the principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread of oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power