“What is pain but a story of mercy? It lingers in my blood. All things end to end again.”

“Competition is a patriarchal structure that privileges conquest. The most pivotal thing for me as an artist was to be able to say ‘no’ to those structures in order to say 'yes’ to the structures I want to create.”

“Rain licks my body clean with cold tears night after night, like some sad god has remembered me, and leaned down.”

“I am not a passing ballad not a bird with crescendo caught between its beak I say I am not to die at the end of this tale.”

“My mother is a strong black woman behind every disappearing vanishing missing murdered black man my mother is an open casket is meant to hold bodies is a vacant lot next to a boarded-up home.”

“I had not yet learned the magic of steel, did not yet know how everything echoes in here, had not learned the different sound my bones make after failure and success.”

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”

“How can people vanish without a trace and still be in the flesh before you?”

“I don’t think they understand how it is to be a girl. I don’t think they know how it is to have to wait your whole life.”

“as if the world were a haunted thing. Instead of linear, a collection of fractured things. Soundings from oceanic depths. What is unsaid holds just as much weight as what is said.”

“Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?”

“Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.”

“I’m not calling you dangerous. I’m just making sure you understand the moral of the story.”

“Writing a list of ways I could be better and writing a suicide note are the same thing.”

“I tell her, grief is not a feeling but a neighborhood. This is where I come from. Everyone I love still lives there.”

“Each moment of winter is so faint and silent it is a memory even as you live it.”