Quotes by Kenyan Authors

Your husband is not responsible for your happiness
Ngina Otiende
The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Running for money doesn't make you run fast. It makes you run first.
Ben Jipcho
You can live a lifetime and at the end of it know more about other people than you know about yourself.
Beryl Markham
Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
Beryl Markham
Positivity is good, but positivity that is rooted in God is power
Ngina Otiende
When you find yourself in a very hard situation, a circumstance that holds you by the balls, that's the time you wish you were created a woman!(women don't own balls)
Akuku Mach Pep
She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel’s smile.
Philippa Gregory
Time is an opportunity with every providence of God to reveal His Will.
JOEL NYARANGI AKOYA
We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.
Philippa Gregory
I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he asks simply, as he kneels before me.
Philippa Gregory
Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect.
Wangari Maathai
Eat the right food at the right time for the right purpose.
JOEL NYARANGI AKOYA
You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart
Philippa Gregory
I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.
Philippa Gregory
The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
Beryl Markham
Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.
Philippa Gregory
Character and education are the wings you can give your children and they will fly to places where ordinary people cannot go
JOEL NYARANGI AKOYA
We are the third world not because the sun rises on the West and sets in the East but because we have engaged the reverse gear and we are moving with jet like speed in the wrong direction -we must change this by rolling up our sleeves and working for the growth of our country.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
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.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.
Beryl Markham
It was ... disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURV
Beryl Markham
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.
Beryl Markham
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.
Beryl Markham
Something of greater import, I think, is to say I’m blessed in infinitely many ways. But sometimes I just don’t see it.
Boniface Sagini
The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.
Wangari Maathai
Two tools are present to us daily; the one to speculate on the journey of life, the one to discern through the journey of life. The former is extends as far as nature does the latter stretches further than the limits of nature.
Newton Gatambia
There will never be another like the other. A mother remains like no other... the same with friends and foes. Nothing replaces the other.
David Gatata
You're not good for me when you're not mine.
David Gatata
My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?
Philippa Gregory
Content people give fashion a life. All the rest seek a life from fashion.
Newton G Kibiringi
(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:)"Lion, rifles -- and stupidity.
Beryl Markham
None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.
Beryl Markham
Your tongue is moving my King but the words are not making their way to my ears
Dora Okeyo
I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned.
Philippa Gregory
You have more potential in you than you can possibly use up in an entire lifetime or even in several lifetimes. Stop making up excuses and believing in limits.
David Cameron Gikandi
Good manners is the fabric that holds the community together.
David Esabwa
There are many ways to find meaning in life, one of them is the love of art
Ndiritu Wahome
If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this.
Philippa Gregory
All that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.
Philippa Gregory
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
Philippa Gregory
I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.
Philippa Gregory
In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?
Philippa Gregory
Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.
Philippa Gregory
Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
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Wisdom comes in the silence of one's chaos
Dora Okeyo
You are the earth, my dear grandson, and just like it takes everything without complaining, so have you shown us today that you will take everything in kind, and there's no greater title than this.
Dora Okeyo
Every King, like the river, is evident by his currents
Dora Okeyo
I wil not heat treason from my own daughterWhat will you do behead me for treason? We are not an amry at warWe are an army at war! This is your brother's rightful throne that we are talking about
Philippa Gregory
And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.
Philippa Gregory
A healthy community is never a product of circumstances. It is rather a fruit of oneness in heart in the spirit of true neighbourhood.
Newton Kibiringi
And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.
Philippa Gregory
And now I wnt love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.
Philippa Gregory
Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.
Philippa Gregory
To venture ... close (to a lion) on foot ... would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it's a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.
Beryl Markham
I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.
Binyavanga Wainaina
This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.
Philippa Gregory
Daniel, I did not knowwhat I wanted when I was agirl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don't want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Verde Carpenter.""And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our belifs without danger," he insisted."Yes," I said, "in the England that Elizabeth will make.
Philippa Gregory