Nikyatu

“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

“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

“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