Taiye Selasi Quotes & Sayings

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones. — Taiye Selasi

A word forgot to remember what to forget and every so often let the truth slip - RENEE C. NEBLETT, Snapshots — Taiye Selasi

Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide. — Taiye Selasi

Your baby is crying, says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanian way of saying your cell phone is ringing. — Taiye Selasi

The reduction of anguish to Hallmark-card hurt. The — Taiye Selasi

The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips. — Taiye Selasi

The little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in — Taiye Selasi

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die. — Taiye Selasi

That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening. — Taiye Selasi

They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
They were dreamer-women.
Very dangerous women.
Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.
So, insatiable women.
Un-pleasable women. — Taiye Selasi

As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own. — Taiye Selasi

I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston. — Taiye Selasi

He was bound inside this body, trapped, an airborne being caged. In — Taiye Selasi

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart. — Taiye Selasi

She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world. — Taiye Selasi

As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do. — Taiye Selasi

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford. — Taiye Selasi

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual. — Taiye Selasi

There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy. — Taiye Selasi

Loss is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn't. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind. — Taiye Selasi

And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don't become huggable like Sadie, Taiwo thinks. They don't become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls - really, they're generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn't work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows. — Taiye Selasi

Sight is subjective. We learned that in class. — Taiye Selasi

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart. — Taiye Selasi

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play. — Taiye Selasi

Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre. — Taiye Selasi

The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou. — Taiye Selasi

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims. — Taiye Selasi

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness. — Taiye Selasi

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen. — Taiye Selasi

How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept? — Taiye Selasi

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create! — Taiye Selasi

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully. — Taiye Selasi

Not sunflowers, not roses, but rocks in patterned sand grow here. And bloom. - ROBERT HAYDEN, Approximations — Taiye Selasi

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete. — Taiye Selasi

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings. — Taiye Selasi

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge. — Taiye Selasi

So, the women he's loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy ... They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
They were dreamer-women.
Very dangerous women.
Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.
So, insatiable women.
Un-pleasable women.
Who wanted above all things that could not be had. Not what THEY could not have
no such thing for such women
but what wasn't there to be had in the first place. — Taiye Selasi