Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Quotes
-
For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.
→ -
I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.
→ -
I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disappear.
→ -
Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.
→ -
Even if you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.
→ -
It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.
→ -
Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.
→ -
Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.
→ -
I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.
→ -
Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.
→ -
Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.
→ -
I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.
→ -
I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.
→ -
Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.
→ -
The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.
→ -
In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my faux-oak desk, tap the On button on my Macbook Air, acknowledge the muse, and skip into the world where the story flows over the day and into the night.
→ -
I can edit into infinity. It's such a joy. I'd probably edit until the last word. Until there's only one word left.
→ -
Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.
→ -
One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.
→ -
Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.
→ -
I do need to find inner tranquillity and get into a "zone" before I switch on the computer to work on a story. Only after this do I enter the story world, where I meet the characters and, together, we work through the day and night.
→ -
The truth, and nothing but the truth, is that dawn begins with a wrestling match with my soul and a systematic rejection of all the other useful possibilities a day offers. I make obeisance to the story, its characters, and the muse with burnt offerings.
→ -
Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.
→ -
Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.
→ -
I get turned on by the idea of an essence - finding the essence of the thing.
→
Related Authors
-
Okey Ndibe Novelist -
Helen Oyeyemi Novelist -
Teju Cole Writer -
NoViolet Bulawayo Author -
James Ellroy Crime writer -
Akhil Sharma Author -
Taiye Selasi Writer -
Ngugi wa Thiong'o Writer -
Dinaw Mengestu Novelist -
Raila Odinga Former Prime Minister of Kenya -
Binyavanga Wainaina Author -
Jenny Offill Novelist