Sarah Peck

“What if the work resisted restraint because it was not meant to be restrained? What if she had very nearly everything she needed for the book to take shape, except for the courage to let it find its own shape? She stopped wrestling with the work so she could dance with it instead. I watched the wheels turn right in front of me, and I saw in Austin a mind simultaneously at work and play. I saw a writer doing their job and a woman remembering who the hell she was and what she wanted.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“What I am still endeavoring to name in this book is something subtler, something I experienced before being fired from that job: the emotional and physical posture Black women are expected to adopt as we move through the world. In its most simple terms, I call this posture “an emptying.” It wants us, Black women, to be emptied of ourselves.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I am left wondering if what the world has wanted from us since we were young is to be dispossessed of ourselves—to need nothing, to want nothing, to be nothing, except malleable tools in an antiblack system of exploitation.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.”
― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings