• “I thought about being gay all the time” (Saeed Jones 8).
• “Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish” (Saeed Jones 44).

•  “To know yourself as a member of a pueblo on the edge of a kind of extinction, and at the same time a lesbian lover and mother, where you truly do live your life in constant navigation through whatever part of your identity is being snuffed out that morning—in the classroom, at the community meeting, the gasoline station, the take-out counter—Mexican, mixed-blood, queer, female, almost-Indian” (Cherrie Moraga 9)

Relational:

• “And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths” (Zami 175). 
•  
• "I know myself insofar as I know I am not singular, that what I am in this moment is born out of everyone I have known" (152, A Year Without A Name)
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• "Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me---so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting" (Zami 255). 

• “I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring-to-have with wanting-to-be” (20).

• “We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves" -Zami