Empowerment Through Storytelling Quotes

In my perfect world, we'd have one black girl fantasy book every month. We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well.

There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?" My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips. Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.

We women, when we're searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one of four classic archetypes.

When we, as young women, are given the space to read, the act becomes a happy, private corner we can return to for the rest of our lives. We develop this love of reading by turning to stories that speak to the most special, secret parts of us.

One day I hope to open a shelter of my own. I think it's really important to share my own story with women who've been abused, because going through that experience has led me to where I am today: It's given me the strength and motivation to be the best that I can be.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

You know that I had heard so many times people say things like, 'You could never write 'Harry Potter' and have it be about Harriett Potter because nobody would read it; people only want to read an adventure story if it's about a boy,' and I thought, 'I don't think that's true.'

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.