role model

I love her.

Sometimes I’m peachy, and sometimes I’m vulgar
Even when I’m sleeping I got one eye open
You cannot police me, so get off my areola
Get off my areola (x)

fyeahblackactresses:

_{“I love playing someone who has so much integrity, who has so much joy and so much life—even though her life is now in prison. She’s locked up, but she’s able to build up joy anyway.”}

– samira wiley for brooklyn magazine

durgapolashi:

“Often, in black literature, it seems as though the author is performing two roles: that of the explorer and the explainer. Morrison does not do this. Morrison writes stories that are more aesthetic than overtly political, better expressed in accurate Tolstoyan detail than in generalizing sentiments blunted with anger. Most important, she is an author who writes to tease and complicate her world, not to convince others it is valid.

“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze,” she told me. “In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of. It was always about African-American culture and people — good, bad, indifferent, whatever — but that was, for me, the universe.””

The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison by RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH

The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong, and they handled it. They handled it in a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.

Elizabeth Gilbert (via splitterherzen)