Ayi Kwei Armah Quotes & Sayings

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

Poets are band leaders who have failed. — Ayi Kwei Armah

You have a fullness you need to bring out. It's not an emptiness you need to cover up with things. — Ayi Kwei Armah

How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit. — Ayi Kwei Armah

I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone. — Ayi Kwei Armah

Where I come from revolution is the only creation, and the revolutionary the only artist. — Ayi Kwei Armah

The beauty was in the waking of the powerless. Is it always to be true that it is impossible to have things strong and at the same time beautiful? The famished men need not stay famished. But to gorge themselves in this heartbreaking way consuming, utterly destroying the common promise of their greed, was that ever necessary? — Ayi Kwei Armah

Unless, of course, one chose to join the increasing numbers who had decided they were so deep in despair that there was nothing worse to fear in life. These were men who had finally, and so early, so surprisingly early seen enough of something in their own ives and in the lives around them to convince them of the final futility of efforts of efforts to break the mean monthly cycle of debt and borrowing, borrowing and debt. — Ayi Kwei Armah

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

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

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

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

A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul. — Ayi Kwei Armah

The present is where we get lost - if we forget our past and have no vision of the future — Ayi Kwei Armah

When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there's no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something. — Ayi Kwei Armah

Others devoted to life will surely find that between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection; that nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers. — Ayi Kwei Armah

She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits. — Ayi Kwei Armah

There is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is the energy in us, the strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments. — Ayi Kwei Armah