“Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.”

A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

My weapon is literature.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.

No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.

An angry man is always a stupid man.

Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.

The World is Large – Its beauty indescrible.

Why is it that you have more practice describing weaknesses than strengths? It’s not your fault they never went to the lengths to teach you how to value your strengths.

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.

Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.