Nikyatu > Nikyatu's Quotes

“The Human Contradiction held them. Intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior. They were not free.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites

“Or it's happening because Shori is black, and racists—probably Ina racists—don't like the idea that a good part of the answer to your daytime problems is melanin.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

“She had never before been so close to a man, dead or alive, and it was his potential to run that thrilled her. Women, she realized then, were not built that way. Women were for crouching, for becoming heavy-bellied, for bearing down and pushing close to the earth, that different sort of running, that sedentary sort of endurance.”
― Afia Atakora, Conjure Women

“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

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
― Michel Foucault

“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”
― Michel Foucault

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ”
― Michel Foucault

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault

“Visibility is a trap.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals, don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Not being at home in one's homeland; [...] being exiled in the place one belongs.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“This is what I do.” I had written three books. It was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it’s okay. Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And you print it out: WRITE.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.”
― Audre Lorde

“This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body – especially women’s bodies, and especially black women’s bodies – because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy. Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go – our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed.”
― Yvonne Aburrow

“Women were expected to sit in the pews, receiving messages from men in the pulpit. Their role was to recognize God in their pastor, not to expect or demand that he recognize God in them.”
― Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

“What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.”
― Alice Walker

“Faith has taught me to see the miraculous in everyday life: the miracle of ordinary black women resisting and rising about evil forces in society, where forces work to destroy and subvert the creative power and energy my mother and grandmother taught me God gave black women.”
― Delores Williams

“However, the young person leaving college today, especially if she is a woman, must consider the possibility that her best offerings will be considered a nuisance to the men who also occupy her field. And then, having considered this, she would do well to make her mind to fight whoever would stifle her growth with as much courage and tenacity as Mrs. Hudson fights the Klan. If she is black and coming out into the world she must be doubly armed, doubly prepared. Because for her there is not simply a new world to be gained, there is an old world there must be reclaimed.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating. Most are two-night stands trying to last a season. Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!”
― Toni Morrison, Love

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions