The whispers of grandmothers

"You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil."

(from "Women Like Us" by Edwidge Danticat, reprinted in reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).