Postcolonial Literature Quotes

“Isa rolled her eyes. “Are you serious? You’re the only person I know who’d get upset that the FBI’s not watching him.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“The stories surrounding eating durians remind us that literature should incorporate low culture, bringing it closer to lived reality. These legends come not from the pens of the elite, but are assembled from the words of the masses, both written and spoken, passed from one person to another—the only way to create a text this deep and compelling.”
― Wong Yoon Wah, Durians Are Not the Only Fruit

“Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her
from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to
enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most
valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no
way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another
departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a
hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.
“What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him.
“You mean the afterlife?”
“No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone
screen turning off? Or do you slip into something strange in the middle, like
when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here and there?”
Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing
him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep.
You’d dream before you were gone.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“A Pakistani writer is never a Pakistani writer, a not-Pakistani writer is always a Pakistani writer.”
― Murtaza Ali

“The time for building bridges is over. For the few that are willing to swim across to our side, we will welcome them with open arms. We’ll even dispatch life rafts. But we have entered a new phase where we should be prioritizing direct action.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“But wouldn’t it be more effective in the end to appeal to the moral consciousness of the citizens of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, rather than antagonize them?”
“Sure, and I suppose the fly, in navigating the web so thoughtfully spun for it, should always take care to appeal to the spider’s moral sensibilities whenever it comes skittering around.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.”
― Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land