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“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

“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

“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

“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