Quotes About Empowerment

Remember that you own what happened to you.

We are going to save the world by repeatedly busting the dread that looms over us like a blimp, by pushing back our sleeves and distracting it with the next right thing and good works.

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.

The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.

Look at us," he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down's syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. "That," he said, "is one cool man.

What those people think of me is none of my business.

I have actually come to believe that a person being herself is beautiful - that contentment and acceptance and freedom are beautiful.

We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.

In recovery, they say there are no victims, only volunteers, […]

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.

when people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries.

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 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.

know there's solace in making do with what you've got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people's eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

You can either leave something for people, or you can leave something in people.

You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey." -- Anne Lamott, "Twelve Truths I Learned from Writing to Life

We were saying, This is hard, but not as hard as it was for you here, weighed down by the anchors of so-called reality. So go now, go, unfettered.

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose--paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

You can change the world with a hot bath if you sink into from a place of knowing you are worthy of profound care, even if you are dirty and rattled.

I never used to take my turn. I always gave my turn away. I helped others have a great turn. I must have had a clipboard by the time I was six, because by then I had a whole caseload of people to keep track of. After they had all gotten a turn, then maybe I could go, if there was time and it didn't bother anyone. Now I take my turn, as a radical act.

There's something wrong in not appreciating one's own special abilities, my girl. Find your own limitations, yes, but don't limit yourself with false modesty.

I began the piling of words, to dig myself out to dare myself

I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of coming of age -to learn how to stand alone.