Quotes by Angolan Authors

Nothing happened today. I slept. While asleep I dreamed that I was sleeping.
José Eduardo Agualusa
The night was so balmy that breathing ceased to be a habitual sensation, becoming much closer to something like the gaseous ingestion of a mango, the velvet caress of a hand or the soft skin of a fresh peach. Sleeping, lying down or sitting up, was, on that night, a divine human penitence, a miracle unexpected and unrealized, intuitive and peaceful in a unique opportunity.
Ondjaki
I was happy with her and I suspect I never knew her.Would I have been truly happy if I had actually known her?
José Eduardo Agualusa
A man with a good story is practically a king.
José Eduardo Agualusa
All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.
José Eduardo Agualusa
Monsters, show me the monsters: these people out on the street. My people.
José Eduardo Agualusa
It was normal for it to rain, but in October- who could forget the rains of October?- now this disturbingly silent rain was falling. That was so nebulous that it was pretty; that, if it had not been wet, no one would have believed it was raining; that was so slow that it was possible to follow its fall with one's eyes. That which villagers called 'the rains of October' was the accumulation of the serenity of such a life. Eyes almost broke into tears on looking at the sun subdividing itself, at the end of the afternoon, in each drop of that snail's-pace precipitation, as if the great star had dissolved each day an infinitesimal bit more.
Ondjaki
In your novels do you lie deliberately or just out of ignorance?"Laughter. A murmur of approval. The writer hesitated a few seconds. Then counter-attacked:"I'm a liar by vocation," he shouted. "I lie with joy! Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance."Then more soberly, he added - his voice lowered - that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events.Truth, he said, is a superstition.
José Eduardo Agualusa
We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever.
José Eduardo Agualusa
The sound circulated like an autonomous being whose tentacles needed to experience a sensitive awareness of the terrain.
Ondjaki
The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within.
Ondjaki
... after daybreak is when I will already have died. At that moment I will only know of beautiful things: the certainties, the desires. When the sun bathes me, I will be something else: without mirrors, without sadness. I will have passed away, but will have been reborn. I will whistle mellifluous melodies. Discredited but, in the end, light.
Ondjaki
The elders say- difficult to prove- that winged creatures also dream. The birds are lovers of heights, always searching out landing spots, never constant here at the foot of the human race. 'It's that they discovered a magical advantage...' they say, 'the sound of silence.'At the foot of the clouds the raindrops come earlier, it's true, and the silence of the sky is something unattainable for those who don't fly- we have never experimented. The dream of the birds was that man of them headed for a land where they experienced a similar magic to that lived by them.In the final analysis, music is the only human sound similar to that of silence.
Ondjaki
No matter how great the love, the pain, the sadness, the power of a heart, no one can recreate the sea. Nowhere else.
Ondjaki
I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity. I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity.
José Eduardo Agualusa
The endlessness of the extent of that whistle resulted, without a doubt, also in an enormous metaphysical knowledge of the art of whistling, which mingled, not just with the hearing of people, but extended, in an incisive manner, to the depths of their souls, the protected corner where each one hid their things- that frightening cave, which many call the centre of their being.
Ondjaki
The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul.
Ondjaki
Dreams Are Where It All Begins
José Eduardo Agualusa