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My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair.

— Aimé Césaire Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939)

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Writing

More quotes by Aimé Césaire

Weakness always has a thousand means and cowardice is all that keeps us from listing them.

Une Tempête (1969)

Every time you summon me it reminds me of a basic fact, the fact that you've stolen everything from me, even my identity!

Une Tempête (1969)

Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939)

They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, ... they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.

It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.

Discourse on Colonialism (1955)

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”

Suman Pokhrel

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Aimé Césaire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.