bel's bookshelf

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way, we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
For when we have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back---I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hat-red, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it - hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful