Top 54 African Literature Quotes
#1. I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
Taiye Selasi
#2. South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
J.M. Coetzee
#3. Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.
Lynn Swann
#4. I've always loved being gay. Sure, Kenya was not exactly Queer Nation but my sexuality gave me joy. I was young, not so dumb and full of cum! There was no place for me in heaven but I was content munching devil's pie here on earth.
Diriye Osman
#5. We should, I think, proceed to enquire into what we mean by ideals - or rather, to examine, critically, the nature of those acts which to us appear to be outward manifestations of idealisms
John Okechukwu Munonye
#6. In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#7. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben Okri
#8. The chaos of their voices registers as a single, overwhelming force cutting off her ability to reason, and all she wants is to get as far away from people as possible.
Zainab Omaki
#9. They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ...
Isabel Wilkerson
#10. So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
Taiye Selasi
#11. He Said...
Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.
Anne Spencer
#12. So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.
Zora Neale Hurston
#13. Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
Chinua Achebe
#15. You can handcuff my wrists, and Shackle my feet. You can bind me in chains, throw me in your deepest darkest dungeon...but you can't enslave my thinking...for it is free like the wind.
Jaye Swift
#16. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.
Zora Neale Hurston
#17. The trick set me up. It's that simple.
Shadez
#18. I know of no evil that ever existed, nor can imagine any evil to exist, worse than the tearing of seventy or eighty thousand persons every year from their own land.
William Pitt The Younger
#19. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
Chris Abani
#20. Christopher's heart bled that night and he could not sleep. Deborah who used to call him numerous times in a day and send countless messages was now not answering his calls. And she never called him.
Ayibu Makolo
#21. Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin
#22. I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow...But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.
Louise Meriwether
#23. In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in.
George Elliott Clarke
#24. The moon twangs its silver strings;
The river swoons into town;
The wind beds down in the pines,
Covers itself with stars.
George Elliott Clarke
#25. I'm not interested in whether I'm better than you; only whether I'm better than yesterday.
Mike Ormsby
#26. We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#27. But how wonderful when the tale is told,
And the message that is meant for us
Opens like the scents of a mountain flower!
Mazisi Kunene
#28. With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
Shawn Johnson
#29. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.
Jean Toomer
#30. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#31. If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#32. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In
Mat Johnson
#33. For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#35. We walked in wisdom with our shadows, in search of the dead part of ourselves, which would be our shelter.
Yvonne Vera
#38. He doesn't tell Aunt Fostalina she looks good, like I've heard other people do; he tells her she looks like sunrise.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#39. The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.
Zainab Omaki
#40. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
#41. And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#42. As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.
Sefi Atta
#43. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#44. like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.
James Hannaham
#45. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#46. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#47. Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality.
Mildred D. Taylor
#48. Education for women is something that has plagued the world for a very long time. When I saw this problem firsthand, I knew I had to write about it.
Sahndra Fon Dufe
#50. The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.
Ayibu Makolo
#51. In nude protests, the very same body that is objectified and subjected to endless scrutiny and policing is used to reclaim power.
Malebo Sephodi
#52. This book is dedicated to every woman who has ever felt self-conscious about her size. Outer beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, heights, ages, and colors. And inner beauty will always shine through, no matter what the packaging.
Raynetta Manees
#53. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#54. Africa PRODUCES what it does NOT CONSUME and CONSUMES what it does NOT PRODUCE.
Ali A. Mazrui
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