Phaswane Mpe Quotes & Sayings

I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology. — Italo Calvino

Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction. — Italo Svevo

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint ... They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. — Thomas Merton

He didn't have to remember, I remembered. I had bronzed the words. No, they were fragments of bullet, lodged in my heart. Whenever I moved a certain way they ached, so I learned a totally different way, a new walk, except it wasn't really a walk, it was more a permanent limp. — Thomas Rayfiel

It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon - lung-burning; mentholated and pure — Douglas Coupland