Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 6

It is in the stormiest skies that eagles find their true calling.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Birds do not attend music school, but compose timeless masterpieces.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Sages shine so they can see the world, not so the world can see them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't wound someone's eye trying to remove the twig from it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If a ship is strong, the ocean's tides do not trouble it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What you conquer in your youth is your trophy in adulthood.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A storm is never quiet because it is always calling out to the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Storms come to teach trees and plants how to dance in the wind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When the blind lead the blind the world is full of casualties.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Light is a masterpiece, but is of little value if you are blind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What others think of you doesn't matter as much as what you think of yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
One who sharpens his sword before sharpening his mind has already been conquered by ignorance.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ignorance is the greatest slave master in the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When God pushes you off a cliff, it is your faith He wants you to use as wings.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rainbow is a storm's masterpiece.
Matshona Dhliwayo
I have come to hide you,” darkness told the star. “I'm too bright,” the defiant star replied.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A spoon does not know whether it enters a rich or poor man's mouth.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A pearl never loses its value, not even when covered with dirt.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You can switch off all the lights, but that won't stop the sun from rising.
Matshona Dhliwayo
She's cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest.
Paula Hawkins
While stabbing someones back, you recklessly expose your own.
Matshona Dhliwayo
[Jesus Christ] used to have blue eyes but I painted them brown like mine and everybody’s, to make him normal.
NoViolet Bulawayo
She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.
Alexander McCall Smith
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing
Certain aspects of dying are still a mystery to me now, but as I grow and study life more, the end of my life becomes more of a certain truth.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
In the end, the cats were rounded up and put into a room. My father went into the room with his First World War revolver, more reliable, he said, than a shotgun. The gun sounded again, again, again, again. The cats that were still uncaught had sensed their fate and were raging and screaming all over the bush, with people after them. My father came out of the room at one point, very white, with tight angry lips and wet eyes. He was sick. Then he swore a good deal, then he went back into the room and the shooting continued. At last he came out. The servants went in and carried off the corpses to the disused well. Some of the cats had escaped – three never came back at all to the murderous household, so they must have gone wild and taken their chances. When my mother returned from her trip, and the neighbour who had brought her had gone, she walked quiet and uncommenting through the house where there was now one cat, her old favourite, asleep on her bed. My mother had not asked for this cat to be spared, because it was old, and not very well. But she was looking for it; and she sat a long time stroking and talking to it. Then she came out to the verandah. There sat my father and there I sat, murderers, and feeling it. She sat down. He was rolling a cigarette. His hands were still shaking. He looked up at her and said: ‘That must never happen again.’ And I suppose it never did.
Doris Lessing
In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don't want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs -- to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed, if it is summer.
Doris Lessing
Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears -- everything, in delicate vibration.
Doris Lessing
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
Doris Lessing
The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind--one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd--left one in a shrinking minority.
Alexander McCall Smith
Good deeds are ambassadors from Heaven.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.
Alexander McCall Smith
Any empathic person who knows how valuable time is will think twice before wasting another person's time, because losing time is losing a part of your life.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.
Doris Lessing
When I was young, I believed God was a woman because I couldn't come up with any other explanation as to why the universe was so tidy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A man who boasts he's the head of the home must never forget the woman is the knife at his throat.
Matshona Dhliwayo
She complains that I'm lazy, but I just like to save my energy for dinner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Women are heavyweight boxers; only, they punch with words, not fists.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A mother’s eyes are like God; impossible to get away from, they see everything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ask your wife for forgiveness, even when you’re right.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The easiest way to be the prettiest girl at a party is to rig the guest list.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
Doris Lessing
He who has love in his heart has the universe in his hands.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Money makes the world go round, but love makes the universe go in every direction.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rose's prick is better than a daisy's kiss.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is sweet even when what you go through is bitter.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love's whispers drown out sorrow's echoes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Quiet love is better than loud hate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When you fall for someone not even reason can help you up.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you love a bird don't hold it too tightly or you'll soon be nursing a broken heart.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't believe a man will give you the world if he doesn't even buy you flowers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A bird cannot love freely when caged.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When someone steals your heart not even the law can help you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Birds build nests because they cannot fly forever.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don't need to move mountains when love will fly you over.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Falling in love is better than standing in hate.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is blind, but a broken heart sees everything.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be the spouse you wish to have.
Matshona Dhliwayo