Sabrina

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
― Lilla Watson

“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.”
― James Baldwin

“I do believe that my newfound sociability came not from transitioning per se, but from the release of the ten-ton secret that had been stapled to my chest for so many decades. Suddenly having nothing to hide will definitely incline one to weightlessness and that is a permanent change. When there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom.”
― Lucy Sante, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

“I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside of the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace.

The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into—[italics] the rhythms of a litany of Year’s in my swimming scalp all fall into the rhythms, the rituals of Black women combing their daughter’s hair.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name