Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 51

Knock on the sky's door, and stars will open it; knock on the universe’s door, and love will open it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Trust unites, fear divides, mercy heals, and love conquers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The only weapon you are allowed to kill anyone with is kindness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love in the rain is better than hate in the sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The future starts within a second from now.The past was, within a second ago.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Moving islands in the ocean of sky.Beautiful white curtains in the sky,Veiling and unveiling portions, as time passes by.I watch clouds, when my mind feels clouded.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
If all work and no play makes you dull,Then you're on the wrong job.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
When you know your role in life, living makes sense because of clarity, and the loads become enjoyable to carry.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
If size really mattered, the whale, not the shark, would rule the waters.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't be distracted by the noise going on. Pause & reflect. You'll realize how much time you've wasted on all that nonsense around you.
Mufti Ismail Menk
I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date …
Doris Lessing
As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.
Doris Lessing
How many races have been dehumanized in the name of evolution and scientific race theories? Is a bomb a religious or a scientific invention?
Matshona Dhliwayo
Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know where to start.
Alexander McCall Smith
Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?
Alexander McCall Smith
Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.
Alexander McCall Smith
A flower’s beauty is birthed in a seed’s ugly struggles.
Matshona Dhliwayo
She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Alexander McCall Smith
He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people's affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary potatoes Dauphinoise.
Alexander McCall Smith
This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.
Petina Gappah
Tsitsi and the rest of the nation who now found themselves degreed and broke, her parents and the parents of the nation with degreed children and still broke, had thought-convinced themselves-that the poverty of their lives could be eliminated by 'professionalisation'.
Panashe Chigumadzi
But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.
Doris Lessing
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
Doris Lessing
It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
Doris Lessing
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing
People are more apt to respond to crisis, than to their dreams and vision. Dare not be one of them.
Ronald Mapamula
Each daily task, is but the future in a mask.
Ronald Mapamula
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.
Alexander McCall Smith
Happiness depends on your mindset and attitude. Happiness is in your mind, not in the circumstance.
Roy Bennett
Don't let your emotions get in the way of rational decision making.
Roy Bennett
To conquer fear is the best way to gain your self-confidence.
Roy Bennett
Associate yourself with people who think positively. You cannot surround yourself with negative people and expect positive outcomes.
Roy Bennett
Focus on your goals, not your fear.
Roy Bennett
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control the way you think about all the events. You always have a choice. You can choose to face them with a positive mental attitude.
Roy Bennett
Distance yourself from negative people who try to lower your motivation and decrease your ambition. Create space for positive people to come into your life. Surround yourself with positive people who believe in your dreams, encourage your ideas, support your ambitions, and bring out the best in you.
Roy Bennett
When you start living the life of your dreams, there will always be obstacles, doubters, mistakes and setbacks along the way. But with hard work, perseverance and self-belief there is no limit to what you can achieve.
Roy Bennett
Surround yourself with people who believe in your dreams, encourage your ideas, support your ambitions, and bring out the best in you.
Roy Bennett
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. ...)
Doris Lessing
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]
Alexander McCall Smith
What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
Alexandra Fuller
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
‪So you've been having a tough time. You don't know how long more you can hold on. Remember bad days don't last forever. Keep patience alive!
Mufti Ismail Menk
The breathtaking view at the mountaintop is compensation for all of the breath lost whilst sweating towards it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Learn more. Love more. Laugh more. Live more.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Alexander McCall Smith
To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it's like cold steel twisting in my gut.
Paula Hawkins
Don't let past mistakes make you lose hope of achieving good. Some of those with the worst past have made a great future for themselves.
Mufti Ismail Menk
Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.
Doris Lessing
Success, like happiness, is a by-product, not a goal.
Roy Bennett
It is difficult to live in and enjoy the moment when you are thinking about the past or worrying about the future.
Roy Bennett
It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
Alexander McCall Smith
A day in a storm strengthens you more than a thousand in sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is in vain to hide a fruitful seed in fertile soil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A single star shines brighter than a thousand moons.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The poor can dream. The weak can hope. The helpless can strive. The powerless can rise.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To encourage people, walk beside them. To inspire people, walk in front of them. To drive people, walk behind them. To lead people, walk with them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The struggles of the past are the gateway to the blessings of the future.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The storm is the optimist’s friend, but the pessimist’s nightmare.
Matshona Dhliwayo