"If they knew how much you kept inside to keep from hurting them, but hurting yourself instead, maybe they'd love you more."

"In her head is war. All the time just war. I put her to bed. I bring peace to the world."

"Black people are either threats or entertainment."

"It's crazy. My life has been full of fun and adventure. but i love meeting people who make me feel like I've done nothing."

"If you're not seeing God at the climax, it's not worth doing. Sex is the bridge that connects heaven and earth."

"Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren't doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they're contagious. They are, I believe."

"An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant."

"Home is where you were conditioned."

"It's okay to not know who you are and what you want. Those with the answers are usually very happy in their own stuck-ness."

"Drugs are the gateway drug."

"Gonna pretend to be a deaf mute who knows no sign one day, meet a woman, and we'll write for the rest of our lives."

"They sit there shouting "Don't do it." Someone told them revolution looked like the Cosby Show. A slight tug with a good lesson. Revolution is a tough struggle between what was and what needs to be."

"After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I'm gonna tell her it's too hot for it, knowing she'll say it's for the plane and ask "what if the room gets cold?"

"The thing about dignity: it can be destroyed, but not taken unless it's given away. It can always be beautified."

"You don't get to turn someone's sanctuary into an unsafe space."

"What you don't think about when you're planning for children is when you're going to teach them how not to be killed."

"What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too."

"Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works."

"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."

"I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft."

"Always be you! Just never think you can always be you without consequence."

"Words have never belonged to those who wrote them. Always to those who needed then."

"Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I'm almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won't make it out."

"They've been practicing racism so long, it's perfect."

"The walls around the hood keep the people on the inside from the changes on the outside."

"I'm not sure what it was or where she sprayed it, but her scent will be the end of the life I loved. And I will find comfort in the simpleness of sitting with her on a Saturday afternoon with nothing else to do."

"Adulthood is depressing. for me at least. i cried at the death of every illusion harder than i cried at the death of friends."

"Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we'd fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I'm wishing back for you."

"White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own."

"I wonder if she's infatuated enough to let me lock her in a box with me on a cool fall day and make love like America depends on us."

"We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don't want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that."

"Anyone and anything can survive the daylight. It's night that's the hardest to live."

"Summer is leaving silently. Much like a traveler approaching the end of an amazing journey."

"On that search for happiness we did nothing with all those other emotions that made us human."

"If you weren't built for this life, you'd be dead by now. i think the problem is people don't share enough of their pain with the world, so they never know who else is in pain, too, and what others are going through. we're never really alone in anything."

"But you have to sacrifice yourself for YOURSELF, too."

"I have yet to go through a struggle I didn't smile at later."

"Even the Us's are Them's."

"In her attempt to make me a good man, I made her a bad woman."

"I wish I didn't need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both."

"I have no clue if it's true and I don't much want to look, but I bet a war happens inside the cocoon."

"My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors."

"I didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then."

"You can't fight and claim you want to be free from the oppressor while still holding tight to things the oppressor gave you."

"It was once necessary to go from somebody to nothing to become everything."

"The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you."

"My attraction to heavy church-goers has more to do with me wanting to see who'd win the fight, me or god."

"Your dreams are so far outside of your comfort zone, you've convinced yourself you don't dream at all."

"The heart will stretch a short love into long memories."

"There are no houses to wife. only window seats to occupy when the weather needs changing & waters to flow past our ankles on Sundays as we fish."