Top 35 Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes
#1. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#2. The moral of the story? Don't fuck with the magical order.
Chloe Neill
#4. Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#5. All people have dignity. There's nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#7. We were barely moving, barely swaying, but under my skin, there were earthquakes, tidal waves. Solar flairs.
Sarah Fine
#8. Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.
Philip Schultz
#9. There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#10. I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#11. Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#12. I knew I didn't want to come out in the 'New Yorker'; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#13. Everywhere I go, I see young people: Confident, forward looking. I have seen them in Lagos, in Rwanda, in the suburbs of London.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#15. People reach an age ... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#16. We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too ... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#17. All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
A.J.P. Taylor
#19. Seeing a cat loving her kittens stand and pray. God has become manifest there; literally believe this. Repeat "I am Thine, I am Thine", for we can see God everywhere. Do not seek for Him, just see Him.
Swami Vivekananda
#20. There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#22. I am quite excited that Moi is leaving. Kenyans have changed. We have a free press, and it is no longer a situation of 'follow in my footsteps.'
Binyavanga Wainaina
#23. I believe in, and will to the best of my ability fight for, equal rights and freedom of opinion for everyone, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, orientation - you know the rest.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#24. I've got scarves and boots from' 1970 that I still wear.
Steven Tyler
#25. People tend to react to other people in wholesale rather than in detail, right? He's a minister, so I hate him. She's beautiful, so I like her. One month later you wake up and realize you have nothing in common with the woman.
Ted Dekker
#26. In kindergarten, we had this Irish Catholic headmistress called Sister Leonie, and I remember she would tell us, say, to put the crayons in the box. I remember thinking, 'Why is everyone finding this so easy? Why should the crayons be in the box?'
Binyavanga Wainaina
#27. I'm extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#28. When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies
Christopher Walken
#29. In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.
Alan Lightman
#30. I would fly to Los Angeles just for a cheeseburger with pickles and extra tomatoes from In-N-Out.
Zoe Kravitz
#31. It's like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#32. Every one, we, we homosexuals, are people, and we need our oxygen to breathe.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#34. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.
Binyavanga Wainaina
#35. This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don't really give a shit.
Dan Simmons
