38 Quotes by Adrienne Maree Brown

Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized – not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative – practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people.

I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.

I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves – denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings – increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.

Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior.

There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.

Pleasure is the point. Feeling food is not frivolous, it is freedom.

It has meant getting in touch with my body and feelings in real time, and learning to express them. I am learning to engage in generative conflict, to say no, to feel my limits, taking time to feel my heartache when it comes – from living in America, from interpersonal trauma or grief, from movement losses.

We also learn that love is a limited resource and that the love we want and need is too much, that we are too much. We learn to shrink, to lie about the whole love we need, settling with not quite good enough in order to not be alone.

Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.