Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 14

An elephant does not need to pick a fight to let the whole jungle know of its strength.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If rocks did not persevere under heat and pressure, they would never become diamonds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Fear can only be mastered outside of your comfort zone.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A seed rises from dirt to prove to the world that its greatness lies not on what the world thinks of it, but from within.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you throw ice at the sun, it will melt; if you throw spears, they will burn; and if you throw bricks, they will crumble. The sun is invincible; all that comes before it is consumed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ordinary people pursue money, simple people pursue power, average people pursue fame, but extraordinary people pursue ideas.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Just be yourself and live life, because no one knows with surety what we are doing here on Earth. Some might guess, but that doesn't mean their opinions are correct.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Danger is opportunity’s seer.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There will never be another day such as this one, with all the variables of life combining in such a way to form this opportunity. So don't let it go, grab it.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
A smile is the most beautiful thing you can wear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When they try to judge you,remember, they themselves are judged.When they try to condemn you,remember, they themselves are condemned.When they try to break you,remember, they themselves are broken.When they try to hurt you,remember, they themselves are hurting.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don’t have to wait for a storm to pass to paint your own rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Look for something good in each person, even if for some people you have to look a little harder.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Rise against every negative thought that rises against you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A sincere call to the Almighty can change what you may have thought was impossible to change. Never lose hope.
Mufti Ismail Menk
we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.
Alexander McCall Smith
Acceptance.Good and bad,Fortune and misfortune,Pleasure and pain,I want it all,Because it's mine.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.
Alexander McCall Smith
It is important to note that a transitional phase has to be uncomfortable for you to move on to the next stage, lest procrastination stymies you.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.
Alexander McCall Smith
I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
Doris Lessing
It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.
Doris Lessing
Your eyes betray a sadness that only a worthy man can conjure, but never solve
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
... the poor always live on debt. At this point, time is the only thing I still have the credibility to borrow.
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
.... does a fair trial necessarily amount to a fair outcome?
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
Nothing prepares you for hiring a person whose only contribution to the workforce will be killing people!
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
Professor, when people say such things after impossibility smacks them in the face, we call it denial
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
If you want to be happy, be wary of focusing on past events and do your best to live in the present.
Roy Bennett
I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.
Alexander McCall Smith
A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.
Alexander McCall Smith
He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.
Alexander McCall Smith
I'm alive now, but I don't know if I will be tomorrow. The state of being alive is not guaranteed, but should I let that stop me from living?
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
There would be no rainbows without sunshine and rain.
Roy Bennett
There comes a point in your life when you realize your hardest times are your best times, too—you will see the rainbow of your life.
Roy Bennett
Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy. I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?
Doris Lessing
It is so easy to thank people," said Mma Ramotswe, passing the letter over to Mma Makutsi, "and most people don't bother to do it. They don't thank the person who does something for them. They just take it for granted.
Alexander McCall Smith
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
Doris Lessing
Generosity is inverted prosperity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Like the worthless dogs that are his countrymen, my husband believed that his penis was wasted if he was faithful to just one woman. - At the Sound of the Last Post
Petina Gappah
Let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things--their looks and their role as mothers. I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.
Paula Hawkins
You can never rightly judge another person's life because as a person, you only know the truth, with certainty, of your own experiences.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Our emotions are the continuous waves and undercurrents that enable us to flow but in some instances, when hold on to them, suppress them or repress them, or express the destructively, they disrupt the flow
Mavis Mazhura
It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.
Alexander McCall Smith
Letting someone control your life for you and decide what you will be is a sure way of creating things to regret on the day of reckoning.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Learn from all, but copy none and just be yourself.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
I feel relieved, reborn, I'm me again.Free from heartbreak, that strong yet invisible chain,That stymied me from living again.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Each heartbreak is a little death, all the same.
Petina Gappah
Okay, let's recap.So I lost a few good things, but wait;There's other fish in the sea.And my heart's still here: the bait.It has a few cracksAnd a couple of shark bites,But it's alright.A bleeding heart is never one to wait in the water for long.I wonder what my next catch will be..
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Now,Because I put you in the past,My life is like:A path paved,Fit for your feet.Now other women walk on it;And not one of them fits.Walking crooked, on a path that's straight.I watch them.They don't even have your gait.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.
Alexander McCall Smith
Before you dismiss any gift as worthless, look again because it may just contain hidden treasure.
Rejoice Denhere
When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky....They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same....Look at them leaving in droves, despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong
NoViolet Bulawayo
She thinks she is white,' they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being ‘a career woman’. This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticized her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does — sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she ‘really’ is. He has rejected her ‘real’ self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected.Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.
Doris Lessing
So who do I want to be tomorrow?
Paula Hawkins
Compassion is not weakness it's Christ-like
Lazarus Takawira
She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.
Alexander McCall Smith
There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful.
Alexander McCall Smith