Ayi Kwei Armah · 191 pages
Rating: (2K votes)
“Alone, i am nothing. i have nothing.we have power.but we will never know it,we will never see it work.unless we come together to make it work.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher's nothingness.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all the blackness in the big old slave castle?”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“Outrage alternated with a sweaty fear he had never before felt. Something, it seemed to him was being drained from him, leaving the body feeling like a very dry sponge, very light, completely at the mercy of sly toying gusts of wind.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)”
― Marisha Pessl, quote from Special Topics in Calamity Physics
“So. Which of our troubles torments you most this evening?”
Althea surrendered. “They all nip at my heels like a pack of yapping feists, ship. I don’t know which to worry about first.”
The figurehead gave a snort of disdain. “Then kick them away as if they were truly a pack of curs and fix your gaze instead on your destiny.” … “Don’t think about the obstacles” … The ship spoke in a low, soft voice. “Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, any one of which may defeat you. Look only to the end.”
“I think we will succeed only if we prepare ourselves,” Althea objected.
Paragon shook his head. “Teach yourself to believe you will succeed. … Be now what you must be to succeed at the end of your journey, and when the end comes, you will find it is just another beginning.”
Althea sighed. “Now you sound like Amber,” she complained.
“No.” He contradicted her flatly. “Now I sound like myself. The self I put aside and hid, the self I intended to be again someday, when I was ready. I have stopped intending. I am, now.”
p. 86: Paragon to Althea”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Destiny
“For an important intellectual product to be immediately weighty, a deep relationship or concordance has to exist between the life of its creator and the general lives of the people. These people are generally unaware why exactly they praise a certain work of art. Far from being truly knowledgeable, they perceive it to have a hundred different benefits to justify their adulation; but the real underlying reason for their behavior cannot be measured, is sympathy.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice
“When no one understands, that's usually a good sign that you're wrong.”
― V.E. Schwab, quote from Vicious
“Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”
“Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”
― David Wong, quote from John Dies at the End
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