Jose Pastrana

“Life comes in seasons. There are the seasons where you are driving through a snowstorm, just trying to keep your eye on the road ahead to stay alive. Your ego stands in the doorway of every good idea, keeping them from you. We avoid the pain. We put our blinders on and stay focused on what’s right ahead, turning away from the thing we need to see in our periphery, because we know accepting it will force us to question everything we hold so tightly. But then there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall. When it finally settles, that’s when you find yourself in the house of hidden meanings. You study the patterns that keep coming up. You allow them to show you something different, even if it’s the thing you’ve been running from your whole life. You run into the fire, run through the pain, trusting that the only way out is through.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Make space for something, even if you don’t know what it is.”
― Emma Forrest, Busy Being Free: Starting Again on Your Own

“Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”
― Maya Angelou

“I have always had a very hungry eye and it needs to be fed with films, books, faces, nature, clothes, architecture: you name it. I’m constantly taking in references, mixing and re-mixing them in my mind, and then transforming them into something else.”
― Edward Enninful, A Visible Man: A Memoir