Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

Strength means...acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.

I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

You are not broken. You break again and again because that's what breaking means. To be whole.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.

When you're tired, sleep. Don't watch stupid tv or play games on your phone. Sleep, and then get up early, and do the stuff you hope you'll be known for after you die.

I know personally the transforming power of the Word of God-it's changed my life.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

I don't get it when girls say 'I'm fine' but don't mean it.

If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.

I'm not angry. And I don't like the thing of the 'angry black woman,' either.

If people confront me with certain questions, if they are not right, I will not answer them.

There is a moon inside every human being. Learn to be companions with it.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

The only pertinent political question in relation to an identity [or its photograph] is not Is it really coherent? but What does it actually achieve?