Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 3

Great sages began as great students.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. 'You need to remember that every time you win.
Alexander McCall Smith
A pretty heart is more valuable than a pretty face.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We all have dreams; things we want to achieve, to have or to own, to be or to see.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
A year of contentment is worth more than ten of prosperity.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You do not have to have the best of everything to make the best of everything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Create answers where there are questions.Create solutions where there are problems.Create advantages where there are obstacles.Create opportunities where there are roadblocks.
Matshona Dhliwayo
How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?
Alexander McCall Smith
Good choice,' Laura Said. 'Our neighbour, Mrs Crabtree, came round this morning and she put it best. Her theory is that fame is like a bubble. It looks gorgeous on the outside, as if it's been painted with pretty colours, but when you pop it there's nothing there. She said that life, love and friendship are what matters, and that what you do is more important than what you show.
Lauren St. John
Without habitual self-examination, you can be hypocritical, but not see it.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam was her own underwear.’ - ‘Aunt Juliana’s Indian
Petina Gappah
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
An ounce of wisdom can prevent a pound of folly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.
Alexandra Fuller
If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?
NoViolet Bulawayo
Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.
Alexander McCall Smith
Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong.
Doris Lessing
They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.
Alexander McCall Smith
Freedom is not a privilege for some but a right for ALL
Lazarus Takawira
But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.
Alexandra Fuller
The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa
Alexander McCall Smith
Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.
Alexander McCall Smith
Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.At least you used to.But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.
Peter Godwin
And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?
Alexander McCall Smith
It is not enough to read many books, you have to read the right ones.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Books record knowledge,preserve wisdom,and disseminate information;nourishing minds, changing lives.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A fool can read a thousand books and learn nothing.A wise person can read one and become great. Using books for decoration is what ordinary men do. Using books for knowledge is what intelligent people do.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A book is a writer's will:ideas are the inheritance.
Matshona Dhiliwayo
Books have more useful things to say than fools.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A teacher instructs;a student absorbs.A book is a companion;a good one, a messiah.
Matshona Dhliwayo
However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…
Alexander McCall Smith
Hearts may break, and relationships end, but life goes on. You can't stop life's motion; it's either you let life pass you by or you go with it's motion.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
I know someone said it's over,And shattered all your dreams.Come here, oh tattered soul.Broken dreams, you say.Now that you're awake,Let me show you something I learned the same hard way.Get up and give yourself a shake.Life is for living, so don't die for anyone's sake.What I say heals her heart.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
I can't think of a better way to revenge someone who tried to break you,Than to live and love life more without them.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
Doris Lessing
People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. Which is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a Communist Party. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny Communist Party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the Party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers’ circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups on African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.
Doris Lessing
... 'You can't read everything. I've never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can't seem to get beyond about page three.'They were comfortable in each other's company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . .
Alexander McCall Smith
I don't judge a person by the place he or she is. I'm more interested in where that person is going, and the steps they are taking to get there.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.
NoViolet Bulawayo
Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun.
Alexander McCall Smith
By lighting another’s candle you brighten your own.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you cheat on reason with emotion you will go bankrupt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I am careful not to look anyone in the face because I don't want them to see the shame in my eyes, and I also don't want to see the laughter in theirs.
NoViolet Bulawayo
The more you give, the more you can give.
Roy Bennett
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
Alexander McCall Smith
A business is an army;you are the general,and your subordinates are your troops.Victory is achieving your goals.Great victory is surpassing your goals.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There are two kinds of warriors:those on the battlefield,and those in the boardroom;both are out to win.But the age of King Alexander has gone,and the age of Bill Gates has come.
Matshona Dhliwayo
...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.
Alexander McCall Smith
He who is shallow cannot think deeply.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Think innocently.Think intelligently.Think imaginatively.Think inventively.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Think honestly.Think humbly.Think honorably.Think happily.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You are what you think, not what others think of you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Think objectively.Think operationally.Think optimistically.Think outstandingly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your private thoughts give birth to your public acts.
Matshona Dhliwayo
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have always known, they have known for ten thousand years, that to lock a human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal. They have always known that a poor man frightened of the police and his landlord is a slave. They have always known that frightened people are cruel. They have always known that violence breeds violence. And we know it. But do the great masses of the world know it? No. It is our job to tell them. Because the great men can't be bothered. Their imaginations are already occupied with how to colonise Venus; they are already creating in their minds visions of a society full of free and noble human beings. Meanwhile, human beings are ten thousand years behind them, imprisoned in fear. The great men can't be bothered. And they are right. Because they know we are here, the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain, already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushng that boulder another inch up the mountain. And they rely on us and they are right; and that is why we are not useless after all.
Doris Lessing