Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Quotes

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.

I get turned on by the idea of an essence - finding the essence of the thing.

I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.

Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe's three dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries - Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati - thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them.

The truth, and nothing but the truth, is that dawn begins with a wrestling match with my soul and a systematic rejection of all the other useful possibilities a day offers. I make obeisance to the story, its characters, and the muse with burnt offerings.

Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.

On the map she looked at, there was no place marker for Pate Island. No color brown or green to suggest her own existence within the sea. So she wanted to know about places that could be rendered invisible.

Ebbing: disappearing, becoming of the sea. Flowing: returning, rolling on the sands, returned to earth.

For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disappear.

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.

A secret could be born when a man witnessed a dance that the rest of the world would never see. A secret could be felt or held in a minuscule smile that was no more than a tic on an aging man's upper lip, or a glimmer of starlight in a bastard child's eyes.

Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

He would learn to always stoop to meet her eyes. She expected this: eye-to-eye conversations. She needed to see everything his soul suggested.

I can edit into infinity. It's such a joy. I'd probably edit until the last word. Until there's only one word left.