Clio Napier

“I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway.”
― Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

“I feel simultaneously intensely insignificant and hyperaware of how important everyone is.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House