Unbound: My Story Of Liberation And The Birth Of The Me Too Movement Quotes
"You can dodge a rock, but you can’t unhear a word."
"I know this because I’m ugly. At least that’s what the world finds new ways to tell me every day."
"But the word was lodged in the back of my mind, and it reared its head with every bit of evidence it collected."
"But I was still ugly to him, and ugly is like a disease to some people."
"This unkindness creates a particular kind of vulnerability."
"There was a funny way that some people interact with those they deem physically unattractive."
"There is no set cutoff or start. It’s just there one day and doesn’t leave."
"In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against You and your Church."
"I didn’t understand for far longer than I should have."
"I wasn’t sure how, but I believed that this, like every other bad thing that had happened to me, was somehow my fault."
"If what I saw was real, how could a body that holds that kind of pain also hold joy?"
"And then she cried, knowing that the weight of this bitter, vitriolic unkindness and the all-consuming shame it brought was going to kill her eventually."
"It made me feel nasty and dirty and wrong, not realizing that he was wrong and that he was the culprit."
"I screamed the way I had always wanted to scream in that nasty, dark little room."
"What was I supposed to do without Mr. Wes?"
"You could call me a name or try to make me the butt of your jokes—at your own risk."
"The rules weren’t hard and fast, but they were clear enough to make students from the outside tread lightly."
"I was now making minimum wage, which was somewhere around $3.50 an hour then."
"If I asked when she was in a really good mood, I could easily turn her mood because she might think I was trying to take advantage of it."
"I remember the feeling of pressure against my small body."
"The only clear memory I have is running through the litany of rules I had broken."
"We were what some would call a pro-Black family."
"What most of the world knows about the Bronx comes from the images of burned-out buildings and poverty-stricken Black and Latinx youth."
"I had found a new thing to become: radical."
"I didn’t understand that on the inside maybe my mom was still that little girl sitting on her steps, watching the happy faces going in and out of church, longing for what she saw as joy and love."
"I was suddenly staring my duality in the face."
"She just couldn’t let that white boy be wrong."
"I was only fifteen, but this big, African nose could smell white supremacy from a mile away."
"My mom, who didn’t curse much, almost never in fact, but she could reduce a grown man to tears without profanity when she was mad."
"I was a grown woman before I truly understood the word rape and was able to relate it to my experience."
"I didn’t understand why I had to keep these things to myself; I just knew I had to."
"And the thing is, either one will kill your spirit over time."
"You don’t think I love you, Heaven, but I do."
"It’s like, my stepdaddy, really my mama’s boyfriend, he did stuff to me..."
"You are not a social worker or a counselor, I insisted in the solitude of my mind."
"Finding the way to joy, peace, abundance, health and balance requires an examination and evaluation of everything you cherish."
"Everything looks different in the light of the spirit."
"I was supposed to be the one changing lives."
"I knew I was wrong. I also knew I was terrified."
"In my early organizing training, our elders told us that to be an effective organizer you had to meet folks where they were."
"It wasn’t the details of what she experienced that most resonated with me. It was the feeling it left her with."
"Sometimes my mind convinces me that I did because I didn’t stop it."
"I had to find at least a piece of the courage Heaven had found."
"I had never let the rumbling come to the surface before, but it’d been there for a long time."
"You searched me o’ Lord and You know me."
"God, this is all you, I’m just doing my best to be obedient. If this is your will, you are going to have to come in and fill in these blanks. Period."
"There is absolutely nothing that can separate you from my love."
"You can tell me anything—absolutely anything—and I will still love you and do everything in my power to help you."
"The scary drumbeat had become a melody in my head, and it soothed me."
"The questions were coming faster than the flashbacks now, but so were the answers."
"If unkindness is indeed a serial killer, then my revelation is that I was my own murderer."