zaynab > zaynab's Quotes

“I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. I"m trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.”
― Lucille Clifton

“Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).”
― Krysta Williams, Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism

“There are two prerequisites to growing wings: the first is to feel encircled and the second is to believe that you can break the circle.”
― Fatima Mernissi

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“We turn to books to prove that we exist.”
― Sassafras Lowrey

“Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for.”
― Zoé Samudzi, As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

“The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story”
― Nalo Hopkinson

“I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war. Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

“The African powers, child. The spirits. The loas. The orishas. The oldest ancestors. You will hear people from Haiti and Cuba and Brazil and so call them different names. You will even hear some names I ain’t tell you, but we all mean the same thing. Them is the ones who does carry we prayers to God Father, for he too busy to listen to every single one of we on earth talking at he all the time. Each of we have a special one who is we father or mother, and no matter what we call it, whether Shango or Santeria or Voudun or what, we all doing the same thing. Serving the spirits.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

“The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself?”
― Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde