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B Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All B Quotes

“Being queer was like holding the golden ticket to a club nobody wanted to go to. I had no idea that once I blasted down those closet doors, with their bouncers of fear, religion, and internal bias, the club would be lit. The way a party can be when everyone inside finally knows what it means to come home. My queerness is a Tupperware container (thank god) that nobody will ever find a lid for. A box that cannot be closed. The reclamation of wholeness over goodness, transforming the perpetual misfit into one holy hell of a celebration. Owning my queerness was like learning the desert floor was once the bottom of the ocean, meaning the towering 200-year-old saguaro watching over me was somehow born underwater. It is the dogged insistence on coloring outside of every single line. It is the refusal to accept a singular definition that makes the word witch at me finally feel at home in the spaces where words are left behind. My queerness rests its foundation on a ground named freedom. I speak it loudly because I have the freedom to do so without fear of reprisal or harm. I claim this life of mine under the rainbow and the complexity of the history it has given me fiercely. To love a woman in a world that said I must not will never be anything but a revolution. And when I kiss her, trust me, entire galaxies are mine.”

“Being racist is neither right nor something to be proud of. It reveals who you are and what you are. How evil, bad, pathetic, shameless, disgusting, wicked, malicious, depraved, cruel, barbaric, hateful, inhuman, and vile you are. It means you are ill-mannered, rotten, dishonest, satanic, demonic, uncultured, or a bad person, possibly raised by bad parents or from a bad bloodline. You are a curse to this world.-”

“Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel.”

“Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.”

“Being raised on a boat felt like it was totally normal to me. I was just another kid hanging out, doing this and that. My girlfriend and I had a funny period of time where I was always wanting to hug her all the time. I looked at my brother and he's the same way. It wasn't that our family was necessarily more affectionate than others. It was that we were basically sitting on top of each other, or side by side squished in together all the time. Because the boat was that small. It became part of our nature to be close to people.”

“Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised.”

“Being relevant to your customers only when you’re trying to sell something means choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time.”