“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.
But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, it's as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it's the language and the whole process that's messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don't know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Look at them leaving in droves despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong, knowing they will have to sit on one buttock because they must not sit comfortable lest they be asked to rise and leave, knowing they will speak in dampened whispers because they must not let their voices drown those of the owners of the land, knowing they will have to walk on their toes because they must not leave footprints on the new earth lest they be mistaken for those who want to claim the land as theirs. Look at them leaving in droves, arm in arm with loss and lost, look at them leaving in droves.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. This way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Leaving your country is like dying, and when you come back you are like a ghost returning to earth, roaming around with missing gaze in your eyes”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“They will never be the same again because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled? Is is there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women's legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera - oh my God, yes, we've seen your country; it's been on the news.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“I know that when she looks in the mirror she sees an ugly fat cow and that she hates her body because it’s not what it’s supposed to look like. This is why she is starving herself, which again her parents don’t know. I also know that if she cannot get out of eating she goes to the bathroom and vomits it all. It was all in her diary that I found hidden under the bed while I was cleaning her room; I read it because hidden things are meant to be discovered. I wonder how she lives, how she deals with the hunger, those long, terrible claws that dig and dig in your stomach until you can barely see, barely walk upright, barely think, and you would do anything, anything, for even just a crumb.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Others with names like myths, names like puzzles, names we had never heard before: Virgilio, Balamugunthan, Faheem, Abdulrahman, Aziz, Baako, Dae-Hyun, Ousmane, Kimatsu. When it was hard to say the many strange names, we called them by their countries.
So how on earth do you do this, Sri Lanka?
Mexico, are you coming or what?
Is it really true you sold a kidney to come to America, India?
Guys, just give Tshaka Zulu a break, the guy is old, I'm just saying.
We know you despise this job, Sudan, but deal with it, man.
Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstn, Niger, brothers, let's go!”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“You pray and pray and pray and nothing changes, like for example I prayed for a real house and good clothes and a bicycle and things for a long, long, time, and none of it happened, not even one little thing, which is how I know that all this praying for Father is just people playing.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“It's not the lying itself that makes me feel bad but the fact that I'm here lying to my friends.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger may be pacified in foreign lands, their tears wiped away in strange lands, the wounds of their despair bandaged in faraway lands, their blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“I think the reason they are my relatives now is they are from my country too - it's like the country has become a real family since we are in America, which is not our country”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Heaven is boring. Didn't you see, in that picture book back when we used to go to school? It's just plain and white and there is not even any color and it's too orderly. Like there will be crazy prefects telling you all the time: Do thus, don't do that, where are your shoes, tuck in your shirt, shhh, God doesn't like it and will punish you, keep your voice low you'll wake the angels, go and wash, you are dirty, Bastard says.
Me, when I die I want to go where there's lots of food and music and a party that never ends and we're singing that Jobho song, Godknows says.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“If Messenger would be to open his mouth right now, his voice would be a terrible wound.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Further and further we go, and the sun keeps ironing us and ironing us and ironing us.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“That crown on her head is very heavy, that's why she is smiling like that, smiling like she just ate a whole bunch of unripe guavas. It's heavy because it's made of gold, Godknows says.
I thought crowns were made of thorns. I saw a picture of it in the Bible, when they were killing Jesus, Sbho says.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Why do you want to see her thing? Don't you have yours to look at if you really want to see one?”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what.
They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their hands and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“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, quote from We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo
Born place: in Zimbabwe
Born date October 12, 1981
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“I've been a Christian since I was a little girl. But my Christianity is a muddy mess of thoughts and opinions and making God into what works for me-like going shopping at the mall and picking out whatever I want, putting together faith like I would an outfit. Somehow I don't think the Creator, the I AM, the savior of the world is something we can mix and match to out liking.”
― Cindy Martinusen Coloma, quote from Caleb + Kate
“Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.”
― Spike Milligan, quote from Puckoon
“You can love someone, hell, you can love a lot of someones, but when you find the right person--the one that you're meant to be with--it's like..." "You can breathe for the first time," she finishes for me. "Yes." I cant help but smile.I needed to find that to understand." And you have," She says softly."Lucy." "Lucy," I agree.”
― Cheryl McIntyre, quote from Before Now
“A merrier baby than he had never been seen. Everything he glimpsed around him roused his interest and stirred him to joy. He looked with delight at the threads of rain outside the window, as if they were confetti and multicolored streamers. And if, as happens, the sunlight reached the ceiling indirectly and cast the shadows of the street's morning bustle, he would stare as it fascinated, refusing to abandon it, as if he were watching an extraordinary display of Chinese acrobats, given especially or him. You would have said, to tell the truth, from his laughter, from the constant brightening of his little face, that he didn't see things only in their usual aspects, but as multiple images of other things, varying to infinity. Otherwise, there was no explaining why the wretched, monotonous scene the house offered every day could afford him such diverse, inexhaustible amusement.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History
“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
-
Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
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