Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.
AMA ATA AIDOOI’ve written poems about gifts.
More Ama Ata Aidoo Quotes
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the best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.
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For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism.
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Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.
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No matter what anybody says, we can’t have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.
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O yes, everyone gets lonely some time or other.
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The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.
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I’ve written poems about gifts.
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Toyin Falola has given us what is truly rare in modern African writing: a seriously funny, racy, irreverent package of memories, and full of the most wonderful pieces of poetry and ordinary information.
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There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.
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Humans, not places, make memories.
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Soyinka’s Death at Dawn, Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska’s Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy.
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They had always told me that I wrote like a man.
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After all, if we look closer into ourselves, shall we not admit that the warmth from other people comes so sweet to us when it comes, because, we always carry with us the knowledge of the cold loneliness of death?
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Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.
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Politicians are easy to attack, but frankly, we are all guilty of not meeting the needs of Africa’s young people properly.
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