"Life always give us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor, every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every breath. Every moment is the guru."
"My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company."
"The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave."
"There is a child who’s not aware there’s a world outside his little square. He must be shown how beautiful the square he’s given is. And that he can get out of it and see the world is his. I’ll teach my little ones how to move and jump. I’ll teach my little ones not to feel defeat. If we take the best of where we come from and the best of what we are we’ll have something that no one can beat. There is a child who’ll find his place. He won’t have to hide or lie. I’ll teach that child how beautiful the future ought to be."
"Hearts don’t dress up in fancy new clothes. Hearts don’t wear jewels or put locks on the doors. Hearts are just drums that go beating with wanting. He was the one that my heart wanted for."
"Y’know, healthy people have got to stop saying things like ‘she fought til the end,’ ‘he battled cancer,’ because then when they die, you have to say, ‘they lost their battle to cancer.’ You’re saying they’re a loser. They’re a loser, because they died? What were their choices? Did you ever think that if we all lived forever, no one would ever have babies? There would be no space. Dying is necessary. It’s important. It sucks. So when we do, don’t criticize us on the way out. Just say… ‘goodbye.’ And ‘thank you.’ And ‘you’re not a loser.’"
"Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service."
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013 (via bitchwhoisyou)
"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them."
"The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself."
