Quotes by Jamaican Authors - Page 2

I was trying so hard to find the single pivotal moment that set my life on its path. The moment that answered the question, 'How did I get here?'But it's never just one moment. It's a series of them. And your life can branch out from each one in a thousand different ways. Maybe there's a version of your life for all the choices you make and all the choices you don't.
Nicola Yoon
I come to call you Home.Those who resonate with my words and follow them internally, will find that place and know It's completeness, its joy and fullness.I have come to call you away from suffering, from fear and from a life of sorrow and into your own, divine Being.I did not come here to give you decorative stories, to excite your imagination, or sign you up for some long program but to show you how available Truth is, and to remind you that you are never separate from It.No person on this planet is apart from the Truth in the Heart and yet the world is so vast and varied in expression.The greatest good and greatest evil is here.In this forest of duality and complexity you must find your way Home.You must win your Self back. Wisdom and trust will be your compass.Many voices came to call us but we are here today because we are freshly called by the voice of God, Love, Truth.Do not come half way home, but fully home.I know the voice that called you is true and Truth and that where you are being called to is also Real.It is inside your own Heart.It is what gives me the strength to be here.I love to see the beings being set free from the hypnosis of conditioning; from fears, false projection and the grip of ego.And I know that to be liberated is not difficult.It requires only openness and the sincere desire to be free.I don't need to hear anything about your past.Your stories are of no interest to me.That is not how I know you.I know you only through your Heart.That is my true connection with you -the living power of God.It is That which I respond to in youand it is only This that I know.I can only keep reminding you of It by pointing you again and again to the obvious in yourself.Now you must respond to my pointing.This will complete this yoga of seeing.Find and be one with That which is imperishable.Be merged in the Absolute.Don't go to sleep.
Mooji
You are the unchanging manifesting as the changefulness
Mooji
It’s so the stories go that the Ginen tell. If you find a beautiful fairmaid swimming in the river, her fish tail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she’ll ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh …“It’s my business,” he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground.If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.
Nalo Hopkinson
seriously. “Just because you can’t experience everything doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experience anything.-Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
I’m kind of a contagion cryer. You know how when one person starts yawning, everyone else starts yawning too? Or when someone vomits, the smell makes you want to hurl? I’m like that, except with crying.
Nicola Yoon
But I like my big Afro. I also liked when my hair was longer and relaxed. I’m happy to have choices. They’re mine to make
Nicola Yoon
I know she's just trying to protect me, just as I was to protect myself a few short weeks ago, but her words make me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscles like any other. It can hurt.
Nicola Yoon
Hearts don’t break.It’s just another thing the poets say.Hearts are not madeOf glassOr boneOr any material that couldSplinterOr FragmentOr Shatter.They don’tCrack Into Pieces.They don’tFall Apart.Hearts don’t break.They just stop working.An old watch from another time and no parts to fix it.
Nicola Yoon
Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.I have closed my arms again. They must do without.To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb. Do not write!Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?To hear that you love me, when you are far away,Is like hearing from heaven and never to go. Do not write!Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember,For memory holds the voice I have often heard.To the one who cannot drink, do not show water,The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word. Do not write!Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see,It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart,Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me,It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart. Do not write!
Louis Simpson
Things will be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end.
Bob Marley
When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was imagining alternative-universe versions of myself. Sometimes I was a rosy-cheeked outdoorsy girl who ate flowers and hiked alone, uphill, for miles. Or I was a skydiving, drag-racing, adrenaline-fueled daredevil. Or a chain mail-wearing, sword swinging dragon slayer. It was fun to imagine those things because I already knew who I was. Now I don't know anything. I don't know who I'm supposed to be in my new world.
Nicola Yoon
Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.
Christopher John Farley
o•cean (ˈōSHən) n. pl. -s. 1. The endless part of yourself you never knew but always suspected was there. [2015, Whittier]
Nicola Yoon
The end comes to all of us...but the end comes quicker to those who do not live their lives as they choose. If your life is not your own, then in what way is it living?
Christopher John Farley
Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don't lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don't eat crab? Not even with the nice, soft, sweet roast yam? And why kill a man for that? And trust me, the last thing any man who rape my daughter going get to do is marry her. How, when I slice him up piece by piece, keeping him alive for all of it and have him watch me feed him foot to stray dog?
Marlon James
There is a presence, a silence, a stillness which is here by itself. There is no doer of it, no creator of this stillness. It is simply here in you, with you. It is the fragrance of your own self. There is nothing to do about this, it is naturally present. This fragrance of peace, this spaciousness, it is the fragrance of your own being.
Mooji
Observable Fact: I don’t believe in magic.Observable Fact: We are magic.
Nicola Yoon
Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.
Marcus Garvey
Whose memories are these? Who speaks to her of this gentle time that she is too young to have known herself? There was hardship then, certainly, but not hearts chained and heavy with fear. Who is it that laughs with aged lightheartedness and suggests that this is still a place of promise?
Margaret Cezair-Thompson
A photograph is a kind of time machine.
Nicola Yoon
Do you think it’s funny that both of our favorite memories are about the people we like the least now?” I ask.“Maybe that’s why we dislike them,” she says. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.
Nicola Yoon
Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.
Marlon James
hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.
Marlon James
Is true, you do feel better about things the further you run from it
Marlon James
Yay, science.
Nicola Yoon
a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.
Kei Miller
How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.
Kei Miller
I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait
Marlon James
They don't know what poor is. They don't know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don't know what it does to the body. To a mind.
Nicola Yoon
His eyes met mine. Brown eyes. I couldn’t read anything and as he turned away I realised he didn’t intend to tell me anything either.
J.A. Rogers
Is it always like that?" I ask, breathless. “No,” he says. “It's never like that.” I hear the wonder in his voice. And just like that, everything changes.
Nicola Yoon
Love is worth everything. Everything.
Nicola Yoon
Growing up and seeing your parents' flaws is like losing your religion. I don't believe in God anymore. I don't believe in my father either.
Nicola Yoon
I kiss him to get him to stop talking. If he keeps talking I will love him, and I don't want to love him. I really don't. As strategies go, it's not my finest. Kissing is just another way of talking except without the words.
Nicola Yoon
maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself
Nicola Yoon
His proximity, that damn smile, just makes me hot in all the right places, but also pissed as hell. I don’t know if I should knee him in the balls or hump his leg like a bitch in heat.
Ghiselle St. James
Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can’t handle.
Sanya Richards-Ross
With confidence, you have won before you have started.
Marcus Garvey
Be resilient until you complete a task. Challenge yourself and never limit yourself. Stay humble, hopeful, patient, but never quit!
Winsome Campbell-Green
Time exist forever
Christena Williams
The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively
Bob Marley
I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.
Marlon James
Because every man who fight monster become a monster too, and there be at least one woman in Kingston who think me is the killer of all things name hope.
Marlon James
Your Worst Enemy Could Be Your Best Friend && Your Best Friend Your Worst Enemy
Bob Marley
I almost wish I hadn't met him. How am I supposed to go back to my old life, my days stretching out before me with unending and brutal sameness? How am I supposed to go back to being The Girl Who Reads?
Nicola Yoon
Faith is evidence unseen and never seen, trust is gained from evidence seen and understood.
Gary J. Spaulding
How can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?
Nicola Yoon
And what about the lovers who spend hours staring into each other's eyes? Is it a display of trust? I will let you in close and trust you not to hurt me while I'm in this vulnerable position. And if trust is one of the foundations of love, perhaps the staring is a way to build or reinforce it. Or maybe it's simpler than that. A simple search for connection.To see.To be seen.
Nicola Yoon
And what about the lovers who spend hours staring into each other's eyes?Is it a display of trust? I will let you in close and trust you not to hurt me while I'm in this vulnerable position. And if trust is one of the foundations of love, perhaps the staring is a way to build or reinforce it. Or maybe it's simpler than that. A simple search for connection.To see.To be seen.
Nicola Yoon
But can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?
Nicola Yoon
How could she have gone from the most exhilarating thing that has ever happened in her life to a moment filled with pure humiliation? She tries to conjure up the light that skipped in her veins earlier when Charles held her. But it only fades in the familiar darkness.
Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn
Words, Natasha thinks, should behave more like units of measure. A meter is a meter is a meter. Words shouldn't be allowed to change meanings. Who decides that the meaning has changed, and when? Is there an in-between time when the word means both things? Or a time when the word doesn't mean anything at all?
Nicola Yoon
After all, don't care how you want to sit there and deny the knowledge of River Mumma sitting on her rock - don't care how you deny the knowledge of fallen angels who can jump into your body as they please, or the knowledge of ancestors who sit beside your bed and watch when they not harkening on to the sounds of drumming - don't care how you deny any of it, all of it is still true. All of them things still exist, because them do not need the permission of your belief.
Kei Miller
Maybe you shake your head, but let me learn a lesson right now: plenty knowledge is in this world. Enough knowledge that you can pick and refuse. And if you want, you can refuse to know plenty things, don't care how true those things be. I know things you does not know, and things you will never know. And it is sake of that - sake of this knowledge - that people have looked on me and called me old fool or crazy. They treat me like I is retarded. Imagine that. I is the idiot because I know what they don't know.
Kei Miller
The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.
Marcus Garvey
You cannot truly love yourself if you are constantly surrounded by clutter, chaos and bitterness. The time has come for you to de-clutter your mind and your environment.
Winsome Campbell-Green
My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time.
Marlon James
However, if the long shot is your only shot, then you have to take it.
Nicola Yoon
Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.
Marlon James