Quotes by Congolese Authors

The teeth are smiling but is the heart?
Congo proverb
Wood may remain ten years in the water but it will never become a crocodile.
Congolese proverb
Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us.
Jo M. Sekimonyo
He hiccupped and continued: "I write therefore I come...But unfortunately, my orgies are never eternal!...
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
This is what I call life: a woman to love, a job to do, and a cause to fight
Sante Kulimbwa
This is what I call life: a God to save, a woman to love, a job to do, and a cause to fight
Sante Ntokamayo Kulimbwa
it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters
Alain Mabanckou
You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
When Malingeau drew himself from his long sleep, the music was still droning in his head. Christelle was already gone. She had taken care to scribble a line on a scrap of paper."I drank your body until my thirst was worn.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and haemorrhoids.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Great Love goes with great forgiveness
Sante N. Kulimbwa
Souvenez-vous toujours que dans la vie, la passion sans vision est une perte d’énergie, et que la vision sans passion est une impasse.
Jo M. Sekimonyo