Mia Couto Quotes

#1. On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question: "We've heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?" And Harper replied: "I don't know, I've never asked him.

Mia Couto

#2. Every morning the gazelle wakes up knowing she must run faster than the lion or will be dead. Every morning the lion wakes up knowing he must run faster than the gazelle or he'll starve. It doesn't matter if you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun rises you better start to run.

Mia Couto

#3. After us, there was no more world to receive anyone.

Mia Couto

#4. Our official histories of our countries and societies are made of forgetfulness,

Mia Couto

#5. -Back there our sun doesn't speak.
-Where's "there," Miss Marta?
-Back there, in Europe. Here, it's different. Here, the sun moans, whispers, shouts.
-Surely-I commented delicately-the sun is always the same.
- You're wrong. There, the sun is a stone. Here it's a fruit.

Mia Couto

#6. And that is what a writer is - a traveller between identities, a smuggler of souls.

Mia Couto

#7. Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.

Mia Couto

#8. A Mercedes or a BMW can't make full use of its lustre, as it busily swerves to avoid the very convex buses along very concave roads. The existence of good roads would depend upon another type of wealth. A wealth that might serve the city.

Mia Couto

#9. I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears.

Mia Couto

#10. He who seeks eternity should look at the sky, he who seeks the moment, should look at the cloud.

Mia Couto

#11. Love is a territory where orders can't be issued.

Mia Couto

#12. Ideas, we all know, are not born in people's heads. They begin somewhere out there, loose wisps of smoke swirling directionless in their search for a befitting mind.

Mia Couto