Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 15

To make mistakes is to live, because no one is born knowing everything.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
And they had nothing, except of course memories, their own, and those passed down by their mothers and mothers' mothers. A nation's memory.
NoViolet Bulawayo
Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.
Alexander McCall Smith
Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance. You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so. What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors? Morality is for everybody and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual person, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave it.
Alexander McCall Smith
We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.
Alexander McCall Smith
The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was always a mistake, she thought, to dwell on the cause of one's anger.
Alexander McCall Smith
Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes.
Alexander McCall Smith
It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.
Alexander McCall Smith
We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Alexander McCall Smith
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
Doris Lessing
There are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.
Alexander McCall Smith
I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.
NoViolet Bulawayo
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
Alexander McCall Smith
Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.
NoViolet Bulawayo
He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.
Alexander McCall Smith
The door to success may be a few steps away but you still have to walktowards it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God performs miracles, but even for a man to walk on water, action is required.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Time changes things; rather, a person's action over the passage of time changes things.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
It was like she had been playing 'nhodo' with her life, foolishly trying to outsmart an imaginary playmate named Fate.
Panashe Chigumadzi
Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true
Panashe Chigumadzi
Silently, she wondered whether this was the same desperation, the same impotence that grips many men by their shirts, their T-shirts, their work vests, gripping them equally hard, shaking them and leading them to drink,to beating or the noose. Was this it?
Panashe Chigumadzi
There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing
Alexandra Fuller
There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]
Alexander McCall Smith
As days are numbered and life is short, why waste days feeling bad for yourself?
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to—or you ignored at your peril.
Alexander McCall Smith
When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about.
Alexander McCall Smith
Most good decisions that a person make are a result of reflection and the will to change.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
When a person works towards a goal, he or she immediately creates two possible scenarios or outcomes; namely success and failure.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
There's no point in being an unhappy success, and there's not much sense in being a happy failure either.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris Lessing
Comfortable in my own skin,I'm madly in love with myself.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.
Alexander McCall Smith
Well, I think the first thing to do when trying to let go of the past is to accept it. Denial only delays the problem for later. Deal with it now.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
We all have special attributes that are of value to someone. Find your place of value. You are never useless. You just need to find your place.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
The doctor in Murare is old - old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn´t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren´t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don´t do it for the money or because thy want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breath or eat or love. They can´t stop. As long as they are alive, they will never not be a doctor. They can be old, or alcoholic or burnt-out, but they will always be a doctor.
Alexandra Fuller
What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.
Paula Hawkins
A small tree with large roots will last longer than a large tree with small roots.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Age doesn't determine maturity. It's the depth of life that does, not its duration.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Doris Lessing
It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
Alexandra Fuller
The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.
Alexandra Fuller
If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers—small boys with guns, really—there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music.
Alexander McCall Smith
A random act of kindness, no matter how small, can make a tremendous impact on someone else's life.
Roy Bennett
. . . there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn't. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth.
Alexander McCall Smith
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
One of the reasons why most relationships struggle is because we salute the problem more than standing besides our loved ones. We honor the problem, glorify it, magnify it and worship it, until it breaks the relationship apart. If we honored our loved ones more than the problem, forgiveness will not be a struggle.
Apostle Tavonga Vutabwashe
Never think you can convince God through prayer for a blessing. Praying for prosperity is a wrong weapon for war. If prayer could bring money, all intercessors would be billionaires.
Apostle T. Vutabwashe
We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.
Alexander McCall Smith
She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.
Alexander McCall Smith
I don't remember things. I black out and I can't remember where I've been or what I've done. Sometimes I wonder if I've done or said terrible things, and I can't remember. And if...if someone tells me something I've done, it doesn't even feel like me. it doesn't feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it's so hard to feel responsible for something you don't remember. So I never feel bad enough. i feel bad, but the thing that i've done --it's removed from me. It's like it doesn't belong to me.
Paula Hawkins
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
The difference between companies that make $100,000 vs those that make $1bn dollars within the same industry is paying attention to detail.
Lovemore Chirombo
I am yet to meet the idiot at whose door success arrived as a direct result of his refusal to invest in the enterprise that made him rich.
Jonathan Wutawunashe
International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.
Alexander McCall Smith
Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known
Alexander McCall Smith
He will be a small man inside," said Mma Ramotswe. "He will feel small and unimportant. That is why he needs to put ladies down, Mma. Men who are big inside never feel the need to do that.
Alexander McCall Smith
It shall be an offence for any man, either a husband or other person of the male sex, married or otherwise, being over the age of twelve years, to throw any item of clothing having been worn by the said person for whatever length of time, upon the floor of any bathroom or any room adjacent to and connected to a bathroom, without good cause.
Alexander McCall Smith