adrienne maree brown Quotes

I remind myself I can't be good at something I'm doing for the first time, and that reminder helps me humble into learning mode.

Going through an abusive situation just creates another need. And if we can stretch far, we can say even the person who's caused abuse has some unmet need, and they think it can be met through harm and domination and manipulation and gaslighting. And they think that's going to meet some need in them, but the need is not met. The abuse continues. They just find new people to take it. But mutual aid suggests those needs can be met. Maybe they need a different therapist, maybe they need a different kind of healer or a group of healers, maybe they need to see that people who were structured and shaped to be abusive found another path.

My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in.

Writing fiction allows us to dream aloud, to dream onto pages that we hope others will read, and to craft worlds we hope others will visit. We are already dreaming beyond this current moment, these crises, these norms. Dreams are the foundation for what we attempt to turn into reality. Democracy was a dream (and some might argue it still is in most places, even for those who claim to be practicing it); the abolition of slavery was a dream (and some should argue it still is, while the prison industrial complex thrives); every garden we find nourishing was first a dream.

We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need.

Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.

I know that I'm not grieving because death is unnatural, I'm grieving because love has overfilled my banks, and I can no longer just pour it into this other person. When I'm angry, it's because I love something, and I want to defend it. When I am feeling fearful is because I love something.

I think ultimately that mutual aid is going to teach us a ton about how to be in communities that can be accountable to each other, because mutual aid only works when you're able to say, "I have a need," [and someone else says] "I have something to offer to that need. Being in conflict is just another need.

how do we start to retune our attention towards things that are solution-oriented, things that help us build? And this is a hard time for that. We've been immersed in a culture of destruction for such a long time.

Afrofuturism, I will say, is a thrilling — to me, a thrilling arena. And now there’s African futurism. There’s Black speculative fiction. There’s all these arenas where, basically, Black people and people of African lineage are saying, “We were almost erased from the lineage. Right? People wanted to erase us and have us just be labor. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re creating stories that are rooted in African heritage and that articulate an African future.” So, it’s an exciting place. It’s an exciting arc to be inside of as a creator.

When I imagine the world in a right relationship, it's a love story between our species and this Earth and amongst us.

Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice.

How do we ensure that the survivors' needs are actually getting met? What would actually create the boundaries and the spaciousness that we're trying to give to survivors for their healing, while also helping the person who has created this offense to break the cycle of harm within them? And some of what seems to help is to have a sense that all of us get harmed, and all of us commit harms.

What I'm making a case for is that disposability is a concept that might be the most villainous for our species: to think that there's some way we can get rid of people who commit harm, and that will remove the harmful behavior and the harmful belief systems from our communities. And when it doesn’t—it hasn’t—at a certain point we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing? And what are some alternative ways we could be spending that time to help us actually stop harm from happening, deepen our relationship with each other and grow movements that can hold difference, that can hold conflict, that can recover from misunderstanding, that can fundamentally make a case that abolition is really possible?

You are a personal front line. What’s happening in your life and in the relationships you have with your family and how you treat people when you’re upset with them — I always ask people that, when I talk about transformative justice: Are you punishing anyone right now? And could that punishment be shifted into a boundary or a request? Is there a courageous conversation that needs to be had? How do you personally begin to practice whatever’s in alignment with your largest vision? Abolition is something we practice every day in our lives. Liberation, emergent strategy, all of these are things to practice every day. And I guess maybe to bring it back to the first question of spiritual practice — to me, that’s the ultimate spiritual practice, as well. It’s not about the bombastic meditation retreat. It’s about, can you sit every day? Can you bring mindfulness into every activity?