Althea

“Kindness isn’t something you are. It’s something you choose to be, every single moment of every single day.”
― Diana Pinguicha, A Curse of Roses

“Take your feelings and hold them with softness, but also with power. And whenever you feel afraid, know you can ask your fear about itself.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“I was excessively afraid of being defined as a woman before I was seen as myself.”
― Nagata Kabi, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

“I don’t know why people try not to cry, why we hold it in. I have decided to cry as much and as hard as I need to. Sometimes it is a snotty nose sob, the kind that bellows out, echoing off the high ceilings. An earthquake cry that shakes my insides and makes my shoulders tremble. And sometimes, it comes in silence. Just tears bubbling up in the corners of my eyes, sometimes falling, but sometimes just swaying in the ebb and flow of sorrow. Sometimes the cry comes without tears, comes in the shake of my voice, the hoarseness. Sometimes it comes camouflaged as laughter. (See number 2 to know what I’m laughing about.) I laugh to keep from crying. A belly laugh, even. But still, the tears are there. And the afternoon goes on, crying and laughing, crying and laughing. And that saying I laughed so hard I cried takes on a whole new meaning.”
― Renée Watson, Love Is a Revolution