14 Quotes by Terese Marie Mailhot

My people cultivated pain. In a way that god cultivated his garden with the foresight that he could not contain or protect the life within it. Humanity was born out of pain.

Pain expanded my heart.

Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.

I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing—I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.Mailhot, Terese Marie. Heart Berries: A Memoir (p. 106). Counterpoint. Kindle Edition.

Today, in front of a slew of white authors, during a fellowship, with a drink in my hand, I said that I was untouchable. There was a gasp, and maybe it was a hundred years of work for my name to arrive here, where I can name my pain so well that people are afraid of the consequences and the power.