Quotes About Empowerment

Toni Morrison said, The function of freedom is to free someone else, and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?

Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

Help is the sunny side of control.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)

Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.

I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you'd dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

She wears latex bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had kids.

The single most radical thing I know . . . is that I get to take care of myself.

I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don't love—until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach—but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it's such a blessing that I'm not left to my own devices.

but you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?

There's freedom in hitting bottom

Forgiving people doesn't necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

Haters want us to hate them because hate is incapacitating. When we hate we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.