Black, Lesbian, Womanist

      I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

      When you love yourself, when you appreciate yourself, and are able to make peace with yourself, then because you are the same energy as the universe, it responds. It loves you in return, appreciates you in return, and makes its peace with you in return.

      Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

      She is a friend of mine. She gather me man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

      Lonely, ain’t it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.

      [Y]ou have to *decide* who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its *idea* of you.

      You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.
Stephen R. Covey