I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
WOLE SOYINKAI rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Well, some people say I’m pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?
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History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
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I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you’re actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
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Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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No man beholds his mother’s womb Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
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But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.
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It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.
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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
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Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
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There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.
WOLE SOYINKA