Quotes by Brandi L. Bates

In order to grow, I promise youll have to let go of some habits. 10 times out of 10, theyll be the habits youre most in love with.

David’s mouth dripped open slowly. He stood with his heels dug into my carpet, a dashed hope, a broken dream. No amount of money could top the priceless look that gathered on his face like an unmade bed. His eyebrows crumpled and furrowed like disheveled sheets. His lips curled into an acidic smirk. Confusion and shock collided in the cornea of his dilated pupils. He was a B.B. King song, personified. His entire body sang the blues.

All those other girls are cake...Im Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn’s spinning pulsars…

Wrote my way out of the hood...thought my way out of poverty! Dont tell me that knowledge isnt power. Education changes everything.

When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.

No matter what the industry you choose to ultimately invest all your time and energy in, be sure youre the owner, founder, and CEO. Remember, if you dont own it, you cant control it nor can you depend on it.

The most empowering thing you can do though is to create innovative ways to bring in livable wages. That begins with a debt free lifestyle.

Unapologetically smitten with thunderstorms...the thought of rough sex beneath an acid washed moon and hydrated stars...

Lowkey punchdrunk off this Sangria-sweet love and all it’s prodigious trappings…

Give me Pablo Neruda, picnic beneath a full moon & iridescent stars, black olives, cherries, dark things, canoe on a river...thats romance.

cant even sleep through the night without you and those sun-dried ginger ale complected limbs crocheted into my thighs...

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man.She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit.She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.

thighs made of hymns, I read em like Im reading runes. Now tell me where my future lies...your neck, can I Savion on it?

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

Whatever it is you want in this life, be it material things, a place you want to be, or an experience you want to have, you must first make it real in the realm of your consciousness.

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

Remember to remember: sometimes your adversary is your biggest asset. Where would David be without Goliath? Jesus without Judas?

Sometimes transitional periods in life leave you feeling like a great big jumble of loose, split ends.