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I challenge the extent to which we place the responsibility for advocacy on those designated as leaders or ‘champions.’ Advocacy is not just for charismatic individuals or high profile community organizers. Advocacy is for all of us; advocacy is a way of life. It is a natural response to the injustices and inequality in the world. While you and I may not have sole responsibility for these inequities that does not alter its reality.

Ki’tay D. Davidson

Cure promises us so much, but it will never give us justice.

Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

The instinct to identify with the universal is a common one because every infrastructure of belonging in our world is pointed toward it as the ultimate and only goal, and relies upon it as the core organizing principle. But I'm starting to realize it's an instinct that can't withstand critical consciousness, by which I mean, once you start to understand how oppression and domination work, you start to understand that the universal is a bankrupt subject position. Not only is it violent, and the instrument that is used by oppression and domination, but it is also a fantasy. The universal promises entry into a sacrosanct humanism, but that is an empty promise toward an empty place.

Johanna Hedva, "sick woman theory: an interview," conducted by Brianna Albers for Monstering Mag

I was too earnest and faced too far inward; I was too wide-eyed, too romantic, and yet also too hard. In pictures, I appear off-kilter in my body, which makes me look vulnerable but cagey, like a feral kitten.

Amy Long, Codependence

The history of illness is not the history of medicine—it is the history of the world—and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interest of the few.

Anne Boyer, The Undying

I don’t want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge. I do not want to be fixed. I want to change the world. I want to be alive, awake, grieving, and full of joy. And I am.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living: Towards an Anti-Ableist Vision of Survivorhood,” in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience. What's really radical is being willing to look right at the problems we face and still insist that we can solve them. A stubborn commitment to solving problems and a faith in our ability to do so doesn't need to be naive.

Alex Steffan, The Bright Green City

Still, she wasn’t breaking up with Mark because of Sam. At least not in the sense that Mark was the only thing standing in the way of her and Sam being together. That was nuts. It was more that Sam was a type of human Penny couldn’t have previously fathomed. Sam was proof of life on other planets. If a Sam existed, she couldn’t be with a Mark. Not even if she couldn’t be with a Sam. To Penny it made perfect sense.

Mary H. K. Choi, Emergency Contact

I had a stroke and forgot almost everything. My handwriting was big and crooked and I couldn’t walk. I slept a lot. I made lists, a working glossary. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Thermostat. Agriculture. Cherries Jubilee. Metamodernism. I understand North, but I struggle with left. Describing the world is easier than finding a place in it. Doorknob. Flashlight. Landmark. Yardstick.

What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

I say to people today, ‘You must be prepared if you believe in something. If you believe in something, you have to go for it. As individuals, we may not live to see the end.’

John Lewis

Organizing is the act of building power; mobilizing is the act of spending the power you’ve built.

Jason Mogus, attributed in On The Other Side of Freedom by DeRay Mckesson

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy... There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

Marsha P. Johnson

I promise that if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement a city can Pay a mother to stop crying...”

Jericho Brown, “Bullet Points”

You don’t know the true success of survival till you’ve experienced the adrenaline of a too-close death. What is there to fear when you’ve licked the edge? It is going to be an oppressively hot summer, the New York Post says, but I’ve got a few of my own stowed away, enough to occupy a foreign desert.

Camonghne Felix, “The Therapist Asks 3”

I would like to build back your body in this poem, but you are not customizable— you are mercury tipped and burning.

Naima Yael Tokunow, “Watching Black Men Die on the Internet”

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