Quotes by Kenyan Authors - Page 4

Marriage cannot thrive on left-over attention, it has to get your best effort!
Ngina Otiende
Marriage is meant to keep people together not just when things are good, but particularly when they are not. That's why we take marriage vows - not wishes
Ngina Otiende
God is more interested in restoring our hearts to Him, than giving us a happy marriage.
Ngina Otiende
Our level of appreciation shows in how we treat our husband. If he’s first in our minds, he’ll be first in our priorities. If he’s indeed special, you pursue him, initiate intimacy, and go out of your way to make him cherished.
Ngina Otiende
God created a woman to be the keeper of her home. She sets the tone, and where her mind and heart goes, her home and marriage tend to follow.
Ngina Otiende
A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.
Philippa Gregory
When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.
Philippa Gregory
There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.
Beryl Markham
To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.
Beryl Markham
We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.
Beryl Markham
Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.
Jomo Kenyatta
Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.
Jomo Kenyatta
I believe that we have reached a stage in life in the economic development of Africa where moving forward is perilous, moving backwards is cowardice and standing still is suicidal but we must persevere because winners do not quit and quitter never win.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
Africa PRODUCES what it does NOT CONSUME and CONSUMES what it does NOT PRODUCE.
Ali A. Mazrui
Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Happiness in marriage is a choice you have to make: fight for, protect, pursue. It doesn't happen to you, you make it happen.
Ngina Otiende
Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
Philippa Gregory
Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.
Philippa Gregory
My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.
Philippa Gregory
Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!
Philippa Gregory
Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.
Philippa Gregory
Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.
Philippa Gregory
He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.
Philippa Gregory
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
Beryl Markham
Life is like a rugby ball. You never know where it bounces next.
Boniface Sagini
I know the struggles. I know the pain. I know the life because I live it too.
Boniface Sagini
And sometimes I do freak out. Sometimes I get offended. I feel anxious, but it’s okay, because it usually goes away.
Boniface Sagini
Pain changes people for better or for worse. It can change a fledging, naive person to a strong, courageous person or on the other end of the spectrum, sadly however, a devout and pious Christian to a smoking meathead.
Boniface Sagini
Take life a little more gladly, Every disappointment a little more lightly, Every heartache a little more positively, And you have a little more days to live.
Boniface Sagini
We want instant lunch, instant cure, instant miracles, instant salary, instant success— instant everything. This instant civilization, we have obsessed with, has made us grow a tad too impatient in virtually everything about life. And, of course, that doesn’t serve us so well.
Boniface Sagini
A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance. It is a reminder to all of us who have had success that we cannot forget where we came from. It signifies that no matter how powerful we become in government or how many awards we receive, our power and strength and our ability to reach our goals depend on the people, those whose work remain unseen, who are the soil out of which we grow, the shoulders on which we stand
Wangari Maathai
Be the reason someone smiles today. Or the reason they drown in a book. Whatever works.
Roney Ngala
I do think your brother grows more peculiar every day,' I complain to Edward when he comes to my rooms in Whitehall Palace to escort me to dinner.'Which one?' he asks lazily. 'For you know I can do nothing right in the eyes of either. You would think they would be glad to have a York on the throne and peace in Christendom, and one of the finest Christmas feasts we have ever arranged; but no: Richard is leaving court to go back north as soon as the feast is over, to demonstrate his outrage that we are not slogging away in a battle with the French, and George is simply bad tempered.
Philippa Gregory
Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.
Philippa Gregory
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
Beryl Markham
There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier
Philippa Gregory
War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.
Philippa Gregory
The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.
Philippa Gregory
When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I did not know that the style and nobility of the jousting arena had nothing to do with this thrust and stab. Just like killing a screaming piglet for bacon after chasing it round the sty. And I did not know that war thrilled men so: they come home laughing like schoolboys after a prank; but they have blood on their hands and a smear of something on their cloaks and the smell of smoke in their hair and a terrible ugly excitement on their faces.I understand now why they break into convents, force women against their will, defy sanctuary to finish the killing chase. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know war was like this. I feel I have been a fool not to know, since I was raised in a kingdom at war and am the daughter of a man captured in battle, the widow of a night, the wife of a merciless solider. But I know now.
Philippa Gregory
The best gift your true friends will ever give you is carry your casket with respect. So be good to those you consider exceptional.
Robert Kodingo
say the words out loud / yes / the ones that make your heart pinch / say them out loud
N.L. Shompole
Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
So, the rationale of having written this book is to say an inspiring word to a lot of people who are hurting, crying and sounding defeatist, an inspiring word to millions of people who are living in pain and indigence. I wrote it for a young chap who hopes there is no life after death so that he can finally rest, for a dejected ailing woman who thinks God enjoys torturing her and for some hopeless lad who threatens his friends he’d shoot himself. I wrote it for them and for myself.
Boniface Sagini
Education is a weapon that doesn't create destruction, that creates peace
Kip Keino
Success breeds confidence.
Beryl Markham
Men die in battle women die in childbirth.
Philippa Gregory
The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.
Philippa Gregory
Always remember: marriage is a gift. Allow the revelation to direct your thoughts and habits in marriage.
Ngina Otiende
As she stared at them, Waringa noted that their skins were indeed red, like that of pigs or like the skin of a black person who has been scalded with boiling water or who has burned himself with acid creams. Even the hair in their arms and necks stood out stiff and straight like the bristle of an aging hog.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Truth never dies.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight
Philippa Gregory
Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.
Philippa Gregory
This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.
Philippa Gregory
(On WWI:)A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ...He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.
Beryl Markham
When we dare to hope, we create more hope in the world.
Kennedy Odede
Dear newlywed wife, somebody out there is determined to shape your view of intimacy and marriage. You get to choose who will shape your opinion; the Author of marriage or offended humans?
Ngina Otiende
God has a passion for brand new beginnings.
Ngina Otiende