lena

“Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.”
― Maya Angelou

“The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance....Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do.”
― Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays