Home › Authors › Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Quotes
born 1968 Kenya
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born in 1968) is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers".
Random Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor quote
16 quotes
“Words. They had the strength to shut doors that would never be opened in this lifetime.”
Ayaana would learn that there seemed to be no absolutes in the world, only codes and questions and a guarantee of storms.
“Is it not magical how so full a list becomes so empty in so short a time?”
“Being human is a rare art; it is not given to all equally.”
“Music and painting bandaged soul-holes.”
“Soon we will be gone. To Europe, where the wind’s weight of whispers do not matter; where wind, and all its suggestions have been obliterated.”
“I have woken up to find the world has shifted, moved, aged and I with it.”
He would learn to always stoop to meet her eyes. She expected this: eye-to-eye conversations. She needed to see everything his soul suggested.
“She covered Ayaana’s arms and back with henna whorls. Skin, contact, touch, intimacy mother, daughter, two women. Timeless space.”
“There are presumptions, in the world as it is now framed, of who the worthy victim is and who merits the power of full witness,”
“... a child looking for and gathering words, images; sounds, moods, colors, conversations, and shapes, which she could store in one of the shelves of her soul, to retrieve later and reflect upon...”
We know, nyara, that to name the unnamable is a curse [...] Even if you plant another story into silence, see, the buried thing returns to ask for its blood from the living.
“The man inhabited his solitude fully, and everything else was extraneous:he and his ship and his sea. In that second, if Ayaana had craved anything in her life, it was this:to be of this replete mosaic as an element component.”
“A secret could be born when a man witnessed a dance that the rest of the world would never see. A secret could be felt or held in a minuscule smile that was no more than a tic on an aging man’s upper lip, or a glimmer of starlight in a bastard child’s eyes.”
“After Mboya, Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory.”
“In exile we lower our heads so that we do not see in the mirror of another’s eyes, what we suspect: that our precarious existence rests entirely on the whim of another’s tolerance of our presence.”
Topics Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is quoted on