Rupi Kaur

“How do you redefine love when your idea of love is something that's so violent? When your idea of passion is anger, how do you fix that?”

“a daughter shouldnot have to beg her fatherfor a relationship”

“I can go to all these cool places around the world, but when we land at YYZ, I'm like, 'Yes! It's flat. It's concrete. I'm okay with this; my people are here.'”

“Really, at the end of the day, the only thing you can control is yourself; the only person you can truly educate is yourself. You have to redefine what beauty is to you so you can't be affected by what people are saying.”

“I'm a brown girl from a Punjabi pind raised in Toronto. I don't expect literary critics and purists to understand the nuances of my experiences, and the experiences of the people around me... And my tradition holds that there is a magic in the written word. So how I write, what I write of, and why I write all comes naturally.”

“My parents didn't allow me to do all the things the cool kids could do. I was quiet, reserved, and at some points, taken complete advantage of simply because of my sex and gender. For a while, in high school, I was so deep into self-hate.”

“When I'd hang out with guy friends, I'd say things like 'I just don't get along with other girls.' Just so they could think I was cooler, you know? Shamelessly trying to level myself up by putting other women down. God it's so embarrassing to admit, but it's important cause I want people to know about the growth. That I'm not perfect.”

“I love that about us how capable we are of feeling how unafraid we are of breaking and tend to our wounds with grace just being a womancalling myselfa womanmakes me utterly wholeand complete”

“Social media has been such a big platform for my success. But it can also be a toxic place.”

“I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.”

“I realize I'm blessed to have the luxury of being a full-time writer. Not many people have that.”

“i want to apologize to all the womeni have called prettybefore i've called them intelligent or bravei am sorry i made it sound as thoughsomething as simple as what you're born withis the most you have to be proud of when yourspirit has crushed mountainsfrom now on i will say things likeyou are resilient or you are extraordinarynot because i don't think you're prettybut because you are so much more than that”

“For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.”

“I won the speech competition in class, and I always say this was my first 'spoken word performance.' It was the first time I got on stage and recited something. I fell in love with the stage at the age of 12.”

“I grew up thinking I was going to change the world, but not because I was treated like a special snowflake. It's a silly label. People are starving. We need to feed them. That's the end of the conversation.”

“There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.”

“a lot of timeswe are angry at other peoplefor not doing whatwe should have done for ourselves- responsibility”

“Why are we so terrified of a natural process that allows for life to be brought into this world? Why do we scramble to hide our tampons when we pull them out of our purses?”

“I want to leave behind a literary legacy.”

“Being that my parents and I were immigrants to Canada, I didn't have the most lavish life growing up.”