Ayi Kwei Armah · 191 pages
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“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
“June is my reason to live, the only reason I still live. She is my purpose. I exist to keep her safe, for she needs protection from many things in this world. It has been eight years since I’ve seen another human being that wasn’t my father or my sister, June. I’m convinced we are the last human beings on what was once called planet Earth. I would never tell June that. I tell her every day that I believe someone will find us, that we will one day feel safe instead of scared all the time. But I know that is not true. ”
― quote from Planet Urth
“Dad always said the best way to keep the mind healthy is to make sure the body is strong.”
― Joelle Charbonneau, quote from Independent Study
“If your head explodes can I have your stuff?”
― Ilona Andrews, quote from Magic Breaks
“On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, quote from Self-Reliance and Other Essays
“I wish to God I might induce her to mind me!' he ejaculated.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Bath Tangle
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