Mariyum NB

“my whole life i have ate my tongue. ate my tongue. ate my tongue. i am so full of my tongue you would think speaking is easy. but it is not. – for we who keep our lives in our mouths”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“I am your friend. a soul for your soul. a place for your life. home. know this. sun or water. here or away. we are a lighthouse. we leave. and we stay.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf’s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me