Palesa Mbali

“Fool yourself all you want, little prince, but don’t feign innocence with me. I won’t let your father get away with what he’s done. I won’t let your ignorance silence my pain.”
― Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

“I was born at a time when most young people had lost their belief in God for much the same reason that their elders had kept theirs — without knowing why. And so, because the human spirit tends naturally to criticize because it feels rather than because it thinks, most of those young people chose Humanity as a substitute for God. I belong, however, to that species of man who is always on the edge of the thing he belongs to, who sees not only the crowd of which he forms a part, but also the great spaces all around. That’s why I did not abandon God as wholeheartedly as they did, nor did I ever accept Humanity as a replacement. I considered that God, because unlikely, just might exist and might therefore deserve to be worshipped, but that Humanity, being a mere biological idea designating nothing more than the human race itself, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. This worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality, always struck me as being like a revival of the ancient cults, in which animals were gods or the gods bore the heads of animals.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“We all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
― C.S. Lewis