Riley

“It is strange that the Yamauba, old and barren and childless, seemed so enamored with children. It is strange that one whose belly has never stretched is still so eager to make it full. But this is not just a story about women and their expectations. This is not just a story about monsters, born from being unable to contort and fit into the small box we have given them and suddenly are afraid of what they have become. This is a story about how deviation from the norm can create scary, monstrous things. What my grandmother didn't know was that years later, society would still create Yamauba. We would still be seen as dark, terrible things simply for refusing to fit a particular narrative. Perhaps you, the monster that you are, find yourself feeding on what you could not bear yourself. Perhaps Yamauba were created because we did not want to name something we brought forth with our own hands. Perhaps flesh-eating monsters are simply people who break their molds, and their boxes, and find themselves demanding all they have been denied.”
― Morgan Rogers, Honey Girl: A Novel

“Something has been happening to me, a change that has been a long time coming. I want to be real. Am I the only bad-doing, hand-to-mouth, barely-making-it Black woman there? The struggle I've been going through and the struggle I've been seeing is too hard to lie about and I don't even want to try. I want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind. I don't want to style and profile in front of nobody.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I’m Noah now, and really, I always have been. It’s not my fault no one believed in Noah until he gave them no other choice.”
― Emery

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows.
After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography