Lauren

“We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about—survival and growth.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”
― Bell Hooks

“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“Time heals nothing. Wounds fester and ooze. Life drags you by a rope over rocks and stones and one day you look up, look back, and see you've been used to cut a path, mark a trail.”
― Bob Thurber, Nothing But Trouble