Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Quotes
Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.
I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.
Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.
For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.
Even if you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.
I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disappear.
I can edit into infinity. It's such a joy. I'd probably edit until the last word. Until there's only one word left.
Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.
I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.
It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.
I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.
Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.
Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.
Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.
Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.
Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.
