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

“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

“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

“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