Quotes About Authenticity

To write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living.

I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.

Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

There were rumours and counter­rumours. There were rumours that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumours.

tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

She grew tired of living a life that wasn't really hers at an address she oughtn't to be at. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete world discrete. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights.

We have free speech. Maybe. But do we have Really Free Speech? If what we have to say doesn't "sell," will we still say it? Can we? Or is everybody looking for Things That Sell to say?

men are who they are. We try to make them into something they are not, and then are astonished when they turn out not to be what we wanted. We betray ourselves.

It may seem odd that such a person would place herself in front of a camera.

It's easy to hide in a statement. It's hard to hide between statements," Cook said.

Again, none of this should be taken to mean that people are faking it.

and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side

You cannot, you cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

I have died too many deaths that were not mine.

If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.

How are you practicing what you preach—whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be.

It was hard but very strengthening to remember that I could silent my whole life long and then be dead, flat out, and never have said or done what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, because of fear of pain, fear…If I waited to be right before I spoke, I would be sending little cryptic messages on the Ouija board, complaints from the other side.

in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?