I think life becomes a fabric of choices, interwoven, all related... I split my life into these two things, thief and lady

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

So often I'm like, No, thanks, to all of that stuff, just give me the room to exist both in the shit and stars . . . We have to fight to be understood as being distinct and incongruent. But I think it...

For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia - but at least I'd learned to walk and talk enough...

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn't care what happened. I want...

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

I believe it went like this - and stop me if I'm wrong, Mousey: 'Listen, we may not be our own continent and everything, but we have a big country over in America too.'

A person's name is a fate - conjuring incantation.

It is rooted deep in your bones

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we...

Maybe that's who you are, what you remember.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory,...

Who are you?" I asked as he turned and headed deeper into the cavern."I am Fenrir the Wolf.""I'm sorry, did you say you're a wolf?

To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more...

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable. She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar...

In the words he's free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.

But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything.

I kept waiting for the part where I'd finally know who I was - some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came.

It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places for places in the world where misfits were welcome.

the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...

I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that...

Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, took the entitled heir her little pouch of privileges, made my calls to the power brokers, did my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got...

I don't know who my grandfather was

In the aftermath, we are because they were.