Steven Burleson

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“A foreign couple came in just after Nicky. The woman asked, ‘So, this is a library?’ Me: No, it’s a bookshop. Woman: So does that mean people can just borrow the books? Me: No, the books are for sale. Woman: Do you buy the books? Can people just come with a book and give it to you and take another one away? [will to live seeping away rapidly] Woman: Do you sell these old ones over here, or are they just for display?”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
― Audre Lorde