Warsan Shire

I’m not sad, but the boys who are looking for sad girls always find me. I’m not a girl anymore and I’m not sad anymore. You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn't he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.

We took such care of tomorrow, but died on the way there.

Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself - what you're wearing, who you're around, what you're doing. Recreate and repeat.

Every mouth you’ve ever kissed was just practice. All the bodies you’ve ever undressed and ploughed in to were preparing you for me. I don’t mind tasting them in the memory of your mouth. _x000D_ Was it a long journey? Did it take you long to find me? _x000D_ You’re here now, welcome home.

Make peace with your body, it's not manmade, there are no flaws, there are no mistakes.

You can't make homes out of human beings.

Make love like you have no secrets like you've never been left never been hurt like the world don't owe you a single wretched thing.

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.

My heart is a flower blossoming out of my mouth.

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.

There is no intimacy like that between two women who have chosen to be sisters.

I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I'm bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.

Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.

Two people who were once very close can without blame or grand betrayal become strangers. Perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world.

You are terrifying, and strange, and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.