#imac

...true intimacy—sharing who you are, the very deepest part of you—with Him. God wants to listen to who you are. ↗

— Linda Boone

#journaling-with-god #soaking #life

It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#love #lovers #relationships #love

It's in giving yourself that you possess yourself ↗

— Lou Andeas-Salome

#love #love

This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it. ↗

— Iain Thomas

#intimacy #love #skin #love

The demand to be intimate or honest with a public can be invasive when the experiences of racial others are commodified as stories or objects that might be traded as evidence of intimacy, as proof of 'being good,' for nonracial others. In this way, intimacy might act as surveillance, through which some people--women of color, for instance--must reveal themselves to bear the burden of representation ('You are here as an example') and the weight of pedagogy ('Teach us about your people'). Intimacy can be a force--especially when others set its terms and conditions. So what if you don't love the (white) girls who exhaust you, who want too much from you, who want to turn you into a commodity or a badge or an experience to share? What if you become a girl in opposition to other girls? This is also the problem with definitions of racism as ignorance, and ignorance as the absence of intimacy--which posits that intimacy is the solution to ignorance. This gives us terrible, stupid disavowals like 'I'm not racist, I have black friends,' as if intimacy is a shield that protects the wearer from harm. It limits our sense of what racism is to the scale of the interpersonal, when it is in fact this enormous constellation of forces and moving parts that structures our institutions--and so-called institutions--profoundly. ↗

— Mimi Thi Nguyen

#ignorance #intimacy #race #racism #experience

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth. ↗

— Hisham Matar

#intimacy #loneliness #love #love

When a man and woman are in love,some decisions and questions are answered in silence. ↗

— Mitra June

#intimacy #love

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237) ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#stories #marriage

I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#lauren-oliver #broken

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. ↗

— Jane Austen

#intimacy #marianne-dashwood #openness #opportunity #self-disclosure