Byron Briscoe

“I believe White Folk persecute Black Folk are publicly, because in their hearts they build alters and sing praises and make sacrifices; they do it all to us. We are admired, and adored, we are coveted for our fleshy part from where our hair ends to where the earth beneath us starts they want everything about this blackness but the burden; that we can keep.”
― Jonathan Perry

“Your ego should mean nothing when someone means everything to you.”
― Nitya Prakash

“I’d been raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as Suzanne would say, why not? I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“She wanted to talk about it, to tell the peasants in the fields and the nobles in their palashos—the cows in the pastures, the very birds in the air— that everything was nothing.
It was a delightful thought because it meant (to Tess) that one was free to choose, or decline to choose, without shame or coercion. For someone who was nothing, anything was possible.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road