Kenyan Literature Quotes

The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head.

Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn't they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul ~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century. ~ James Buchan

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.
Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves. ~ Ruskin Bond

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate ... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins. ~ Franz Kafka

If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad ~ George Orwell

Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

One of the reasons I always come back to representations of loneliness in plays, films, and literature is that they give us specific examples of the powerful hold that it has on us, and yet, paradoxically, by representing what can't really be represented, so to speak, they give us ways of going forward even as we fall apart. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full. ~ Rashers Tierney

Unusual doors often take you to the unusual worlds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. ~ Michael Cunningham

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful ~ Oscar Wilde

Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability. ~ Ben Lerner

Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact. ~ Robert Galbraith

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. ~ Carl Sandburg

As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life. ~ Japan Foundation

Literature is language charged with meaning ~ Ezra Pound

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one. ~ Herbert Read

All those who leave immigrate to better lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matter, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk towards our chosen burials. ~ Rawi Hage

Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actural event. ~ Alberto Manguel

Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another. ~ Philip Larkin

. . . literature is not frivolous pseudo-statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name. ~ Jonathan Culler

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all. ~ Madame De Stael

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword. ~ Walter Kirn

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life ... again I should point to India. ~ Max Muller

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake.
Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end. ~ Max Jacob

The experience of this demoralizing crisis [of the Babylonian exile], which appeared to negate all the central elements that Yahweh had ordained for Israel's well-being, could easily have meant the end of Israel's religion. Remarkably, it provoked instead an almost explosive flowering of theological literature during the exilic period. (p. 139) ~ Rainer Albertz

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy. ~ Roberto Bolano

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious. ~ Mortimer J. Adler And Charles Van Doren

It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts, you have no idea of the pain it gives one. ~ Lord Byron

Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world? ~ Kamila Shamsie

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it. ~ Vaclav Havel

They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement. ~ Jane Austen

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart. ~ Helen Rowland

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand. ~ Virginia Woolf

Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity. ~ Scott Farris

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation. ~ Franz Kafka

I don't believe there is a God", I said fiercely, "and if there is, He's not the merciful being He's always depicted, or He wouldn't be always torturing me for His own amusement. ~ Miles Franklin

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature ~ Anita Brookner

writing home"

here in the wilderness of australia
writing home becomes easy
in spite of the spreading wild fires
there is less heat, more certainty.

writing home, writing this
i think of those without real homes–
our city, people say, provides houses
which do not, often, bring one home. ~ Kirpal Singh

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. ~ George Bernard Shaw