“So I am not a broken heart.
I am not the weight I lost or miles or ran and I am not the way I slept on my doorstep under the bare sky in smell of tears and whiskey because my apartment was empty and if I were to be this empty I wanted something solid to sleep on. Like concrete.
I am not this year and I am not your fault.
I am muscles building cells, a little every day, because they broke that day,
but bones are stronger once they heal and I am smiling to the bus driver and replacing my groceries once a week and I am not sitting for hours in the shower anymore.
I am the way a life unfolds and bloom and seasons come and go and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life.
I am not your fault.”

-Charlotte Eriksson

Power is the ability to make people say yes when they’d rather say no.
—Anonymous

Wings...
 

MLK Day
 

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. -Martin Luther King

“Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”


― Ella Baker


"We're going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see."


-- Viola Gregg Liuzzo

Leaders...
 

Perspective...
 

Beautiful things...
 

Smile...
 

Beloved...
 

True Love...
 

A drop of you...
 

The rose...
 

In consideration of the annual march for life today...


“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”

Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

Happy birthday to Patricia Highsmith
 

“... She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.”

-Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

(Jan. 19, 1921 - Feb. 4, 1995)

“People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.” ~Faulkner

All false prophets create a heightened sense of looming danger that allows them to consolidate power to a tragic end. Historically, the reaction of the panicked people is to retreat to their respective "tribes," and there you see the rise of protectionism, nationalism, populism, xenophobia, nativism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia, with the corresponding reactions of increased hate speech and violence toward anything "foreign." ... Today, Trump is the West's most powerful false prophet.

—Vicente Fox, Former President of Mexico

More power to Mo’Nique
 

I’ma throw shade, if I can’t get paid. —Lil Kim