Dika > Dika's Quotes

“The language marches in step with the executioners.
Therefore we must get a new language.”
― Tomas Transtromer

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”
― Chinua Achebe.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
― Toni Morrison

“A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”
― Wole Soyinka

“To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.”
― W.G. Sebald

“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.”
― Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

“There is another world and it is in this one. ”
― Paul Éluard

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”
― Chinua Achebe

“To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them”
― Voltaire