Own Voices Quotes

“My room is the safest place my body has. My mind doesn’t really have a safe place.”
― Anna Whateley

“Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“The sense of wonder and possibility – that I owed to the Argentine women who had fought for freedom before the universe conspired and the stars aligned to make me.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I’ll rescue myself. No one will ever lock me up in a tower.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“The girl Diego said he loved was the strong one, the winning Camila, the one with a future she was forging for herself… If he rescued me, if I quit for him. I wouldn’t be the girl he loved. I wouldn’t be myself.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I’d leave this house the first chance I got, but not by chasing after a boy, including my brother. I’d do it on my own terms, following my dreams, not someone else’s.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I was tired of running. We were all buried underneath mountains of blame, shame, guilt, and lies.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“The rest of my life is a mess, but at least on the pitch I get to do what I love.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“We must tell our stories ourselves, you know, or else they will destroy us in their own violent making.”
― Ryan La Sala, Reverie

“Twenty years from now, would that be me? Would I be resigned to my fate, pushing my daughter toward the light so she could be free? Or pulling her down so I wouldn’t be along in the dark?”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I felt joy for being alive, playing a sport that a generation ago could have landed me in prison.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I wanted what he Diego had. I needed to play on a team like that, to feel the love of the fans. I needed the chance to do something impossible and amazing. To be great.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Keep your goal in sight. Keep your priorities straight, and it will all be worth it.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Umi didn’t know
that I had cut school
to visit the art museum downtown
I had cut school
to sit in the park
on a bench with my sketch pad
drawing trees and leaves and sky and birds
just to get my skills up
just to understand the rules
of line and texture
and shading
and
black and white
Just so I can break those rules
And I didn’t need Ms. Rinaldi
to tell me that I wasn’t advanced
or I didn’t have history”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Re-examine all you have been told,' Whitman tells us, 'and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.' Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally 'like' us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of 'likeness.' It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism 'impactful' or mourning the loss of the modal verb 'shall.' As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads.”
― Zadie Smith

“I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.”
― Zadie Smith

“I was just a girl with strong legs and a stubborn streak.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Rosario showed a different face depending on how you looked at her. She changed when you saw her from a bus, or a luxury car, or your own feet.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Nothing escapes my alphabet powers. It’s exhausting.”
― Anna Whateley, Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal

“Lies have long legs.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“For all the girls and women pushed into the abyss of expendability and invisibility.” Daunis, The FIrekeeper's Daughter”
― Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter

“I pray…for all the girls and women pushed into the abyss of expendability and invisibility.”
Daunis, The Firekeeper's Daughter”
― Angeline Boulley, The Firekeeper’s Daughter

“There’s No Place Like Home,” an oil painting of a woman sprawled out on the floor, half of her painted brown, the other half white, with each half of her body in a differently decorated room. One half was a traditional British home, the other half a Persian one with ornate carpets and gold details glittering on the shelves. Catholic symbols mixed with the elements of nature. Mixed. A dichotomy of two colliding worlds, two pieces of a whole.”
― M.E. Evans, House of Secrets

“Don't follow the leader or the crowds path, make your own and let them follow you.”
― Corletia Banks

“Gramma Pearl fixed my earache with my pee!" GrandMary recoiled and, a heart-beat later, glared at my mother as if this was her fault. something split inside me when I saw my mother's embarrassment. I learned there were times when I was expected to be a Fontaine and other times when it was safe to be a Firekeeper.”
― Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter

“Mr. Lazar says, "Hearing loss is just that, a loss. It can be just as traumatic as losing a loved one or a pet, and it takes time to move on. So I wonder, have you all really given yourselves, and especially Rayne, enough time to grieve her loss?"
Hardcopy pg. 287”
― Kerry O'Malley Cerra, Hear Me

“This book does not represent autism, and neither I nor Cassie represent autistic people. We are simply individual voices in a choir of millions of amazing neurodivergent people, all with our own experiences, or own ways of seeing the world, our own ways of existing. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, and I would not want to try. So, whether you enjoyed this book or not, whether you see yourself represented in this story or not, I urge you to seek out other autistic voices.
We are beautiful, we are unique, and we are legion.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“And the truth of your experience can onlycome through in your own voice. If it is wrapped in someone else's voice, we readers will feel suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else's clothes. You cannot write out of someone else's big dark place; you can only write out of your own.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“After receiving a diagnosis, the minimal resources that we may be linked to (if we're lucky) are for the benefit of parents, carers and those who are third-party viewers, rather than for neurodivergent people. We're given books that have been created by doctors and psychologists and neurologists who may have studied our brains for a number of years and can spit out information until the cows come home. But, assuming they are neurotypical, they have never and will never experience or understand what it feels like to have our minds. We're given clinical books and clinical videos, and are taught as soon as the new label is attached to us that it's a cold, medical, distant thing, like our brains are no longer ours.

And, when we try to rid ourselves of these views and do our own research in an attempt to find things that feel closer to home and less analytical and impersonal, we are led to articles, sob stories, and posts that highlight the disappointment, fear and sorrow that surround all aspects of us, making us feel further invalidated, segregated and alienated.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After