Ebony Ragin

“She blinked away the tears in her eyes that today were almost the color of periwinkle flowers. She looked like my grandmother, but in that moment, different to me somehow. Like the release of all that she had been holding inside, the sharing of it with me had given her back some of the girlish qualities of her youth. She looked beautiful, in the light from the window, like a goddess bathing in her own resplendence. Who knew that those aged hands, showing blue veins and resting on the rocking chair had once held the weight of the world? For a while, we just sat there—quietly, holding the space between us. Sometimes, there is just nothing more to be said.”
― Jayne Allen, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted

“It just seemed that once 30 hit, all the folks for whom marriage meant something, especially the men who considered having a wife and family as an accomplishment in its own right, they’d already taken their nearest best option to the altar. The men that were left and still single, well, they considered it an accomplishment that they had neither wife nor child, and never got “caught up” or “caught slippin” which likened falling in love to unprotected casual sex. They treated love like a disease you catch, and if real adult commitment was the incurable version of it, then for them family was basically death. And goodness knows, I wasn’t trying to kill anybody—what I wanted was that same-page kind of love, the kind between two people where there were a lot more answers than questions.”
― Jayne Allen, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted

“Anything and everything we experience is a function of what and how we think. How we think determines our feelings and behavior. How we behave determines the nature and quality of our lives. This also means that any emotional investment (i.e., feelings) that are attached to a particular thought pattern will resurface each time the pattern is engaged or entertained. To neutralize and eventually eliminate an unconscious, unproductive pattern of thought and the associated feelings, a steady stream of new thoughts must be introduced.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Get Over It!: Thought Therapy for Healing the Hard Stuff

“Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives.”
― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower