15 Quotes by Ayi Kwei Armah

I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.

Unless, of course, one chose to join the increasing numbers who had decided they were so deep in despair that there was nothing worse to fear in life. These were men who had finally, and so early, so surprisingly early seen enough of something in their own ives and in the lives around them to convince them of the final futility of efforts of efforts to break the mean monthly cycle of debt and borrowing, borrowing and debt.

Outrage alternated with a sweaty fear he had never before felt. Something, it seemed to him was being drained from him, leaving the body feeling like a very dry sponge, very light, completely at the mercy of sly toying gusts of wind.

Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits.

...there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is the energy in us, the strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments.

The present is where we get lost – if we forget our past and have no vision of the future.

Where I come from revolution is the only creation, and the revolutionary the only artist.

Poets are band leaders who have failed.