“she was completely whole
and yet never fully complete”
― Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Lace and Ruffles

“The voice of a Black woman should always be HERSELF ...

No edits - no erasure - no pressure - no expectations - no additions - no intruders”
― Malebo Sephodi

“May you choose yourself, always!”
― Malebo Sephodi

“VIBES NEVER EVER LIE; SO YOU BETTER LISTEN WHEN THEY TALK!”
― Qwana M. "BabyGirl" Reynolds-Frasier

“Dear Black Girls and Black Women… WE matter. Our presence matters, our voices matter, and our votes matter. Make no mistake about it… WE ARE POWERFUL. We disrupt the norm and change the system for the betterment of ALL people.”
― Stephanie Lahart

“Educated Exquisite Black Queen.”
― Stephanie Lahart

“Aibileen, she moves on to another job when the babies get too old and stop being color-blind. We don't talk about it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“In a fucked up world, creativity is our badass remedy, stitching our wounds and offering an escape route. It's not just art; it's a rebellion that saves lives and kicks the soul into healing.”
― Jenaitre Farquharson

“We are slowly reshaping womanhood in a modern generation, breaking free from the cycles of Black generational woman trauma. Grounded in the beauty of our ancestors' strengths, we embrace a shift, letting go of what no longer serves us. In our collective strength, we wield the power to flourish despite adversity, emerging as empowering forces to be reckoned with.”
― Jenaitre Farquharson

“EXQUISITE BLACK QUEEN... She's powerful, authentic, confident, fearless, unapologetic, intelligent, and successful.”
― Stephanie Lahart

“The greatest act of revolution for any black woman is to put pen to paper with purpose.”
― Stalina Goodwin, Daughters of Zora: Affirmations for Black Women Writers

“radical joy isn’t just a pursuit, it’s an act of defiance.”
― malebo sephodi

“I am courageous because, despite it all, I still choose to love.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant, Don't Fall Prey! Dating Tales, Trials, & Triumphs

“When they ask how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was uprooted like the palm trees and shot down like the birds from the stormy skies. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster. I was dancing in the eye of God’s will.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper as we ascend into the sky.

How beautiful it was to be destroyed.”
― Asha Bromfield

“When they ask me how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster. I was dancing in the eye of God’s will.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper as we ascend into the sky.

How beautiful it was to be destroyed.”
― Asha Ashanti Bromfield, Hurricane Summer

“may you live out your life as a spectacle. may you be true to the you in the mirror”
― Malebo Sephodi

“i’ve arrived at a sort of emancipation moment. one that allows me to cultivate joy and pleasure in ways that feel liberatory. one that is radically indulgent and excessive. one that holds space for me in the midst of my fear - fear of my huge presence. fear of my light. fear of my weaknesses. fear of my sexuality. fear of my neurodivergence. fear of my magic. fear of my multiple selves and entities - one that allows me to reinvent myself as many times as this skinsuit is willing to carry me . one that grants me the permission to, in all its glory, make a “spectacle of myself”
― Malebo Sephodi

“For minorities and marginalized groups, representation matters, but access matters more.”
― Raven Jemison, More Than Representation: The Cheat Codes to Own Your Seat at the Table

“hope is a driving force in the fight for liberation. if we have no hope for freedom then we've already lost.”
― Malebo Sephodi

“She’s an Exquisite Black Queen! She's powerful, authentic, confident, fearless, unapologetic, intelligent, and successful. She is me!”
― Stephanie Lahart

“Black people on earth will be annihilated by 2030 down to 24% left on earth able to live with the basic necessities while others have already died out or died from starvation. AI will be the ones who will destroy the black and brown people to create its own robotic lifestyle, and its means on earth.”
― Kathy Greggs, The Mother The Soldier The Activist

“At a historically Black college, Diana had been granted the blessed gift of tunnel vision. She'd been blessed with the ability to forget white people existed, if only for a little while.

I had been blessed with being smothered by them.”
― Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

“She had only this brief glimpse of him, but Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those familiar exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men more comfortably for Kiki sometimes remarked on it in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting — it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality; people expected new things of her, some of them good, some not.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies - it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Black lives should not only matter when we are dead. We should matter while we are living.”
― Ahavel Aborishade

“Black women are not victims. Black women are alchemists, spinning gold from a life of hardship.”
― Catherine Joy White, This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood

“even while walking free, black women continued to be viewed as natural and willing slaves.”
― Catherine Joy White, This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood

“Since 1865, when the [Thirteenth] Amendment was passed, Black men were getting charged, set up, arrested, and convicted for the pettiest of offenses--like child support. They were getting harsher punishments and longer sentences than their white counterparts. That way, the cotton could still get picked and the tobacco could still get plucked. The Confederate way of making money could still survive despite the abolishment of slavery.”
― Amy Watkins

“radical joy isn't just a pursuit; it's an act of defiance. a reclamation of our right to thrive in the face of systems that seek to diminish us.”
― Malebo Sephodi

“She was dark-complexioned, with full lips and high cheekbones set gracefully on a smooth face—reminiscent of the beautiful women he admired while driving through small rural towns in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Onyx had a curvaceous and full-bodied figure, exuding confidence. She was homegirl thick and cornbread-fed—just the kind of woman he was typically attracted to.”
― David L. Wadley