Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!
For letter I, I’ve chosen quotes from I am Change by Suzy Zail. It’s an eye-opening and emotional story about life for a young girl in a Ugandan village. Zail covers tough topics such as female exploitation, forced marriage, domestic violence, and FGM with unflinching realism. But she also shows the resilience of young women in these situations and their potential to break the mold for generations to come. The story brought me to tears more than once and inspired me to do more research on the issues faced by Ugandan girls and women.
My Favourite Quotes from I am Change
“Once upon a dark time in a place where you can’t sing or dance or dream, a girl was born. Her father cried when he saw the child was a girl, for he knew that in this land that made girls invisible, his daughter would suffer.”
“It’s like slipping into someone’s skin…you can be anyone, do anything… It’s like dancing Taata. The same magic spreads through me when I open a book.”
“Education is the ladder out of poverty.”
“Being a girl doesn’t mean that we are weak. Being female is our strength. We can build fences, do maths and feed our family. We can have businesses and babies. We are not stupid or dirty or lazy or weak. Armed with books and pens we can do anything.”
“I saw this skinny barefoot girl in a second-hand uniform building a future and it made me think, maybe I could too.”
“As she read, her writing changed. She wrote powerful women on her page, women who ran their own households. Doctors and poets, engineers and inventors, both black and white.”
“Lilian couldn’t imagine how keeping house for a man could ever come close to following a line of words into a new world.”
“People invent traditions and discard them. People make a culture. The culture doesn’t make us.”
“If you want to move mountains, you must start by lifting stones.”
Suzy Zail, I am Change.
Would you be interested in reading this novel? Do you have a favourite quote by an author or from a book beginning with I? Let me know in the comments!
Great quotes.
Ronel visiting for the A-Z Challenge My Languishing TBR: I
It is a stunning book.
“As she read, her writing changed. She wrote powerful women on her page, women who ran their own households. Doctors and poets, engineers and inventors, both black and white” I resonated with this quote the most. What a wonderful post! Thank You for sharing this!
I found it so moving. There’s a great feminist message for young girls.