Top 15 Ayi Kwei Armah Quotes

Others have come searching. Wha t they find they take back to America [...] to sell [...]

Yet she suspected that in its ten thousand disguises Cinque's Zombi corpse still ruled Africa; that those working to remember the dismembered continent were still fugitives in need of sanctuary from the storm troopers of destruction.

Changes that seem reasonable, natural and basic," Armah says, "the academic world, far from performing as the rational part of a confused universe, seemed peculiarly denatured in its own right

Here, educated people use their intelligence to avoid risk, to accumulate power, money, privilege. We call it security. That makes our choices sound less cowardly, not so greedy

He seemed to have no weight at all. There he was winning prizes, playing for the school team, starting a study group. Yet he drew no feeling of importance from anything he did. He floated

The companionship risked attack from those ambitious todominate others. For it respected no social hierarchies, only the fellowship of shared ideals and work. Those whose powerwas based on force and fraud quickly enough understood that this society of intelligence and wotk, this society of life, the companionship of the ankh, would end their rule if it survived. They tried to destroy it

It was to work against such continuous disasters (induced by our interaction with the whites) that the companionship of the ankh was bom: an ellipse of life linking future with past through intelligent work in the present. This, [...] was no royal society. There were farmers and princes and potters in it, there were masons and cobblers and aristocrats and fishers in it, there were priests and scribes in it. They were in the companionship not because they wete peasants or princes or aristocrats or scribes, but because they agreed to work to its aims. [...] Because it was devoted to life, its chosen symbol was the oldest of Africa's life signs, the ankh

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

Send me words of eloquence.

He saw a fierce, nameless beast, half serpent and half forest cat. The beast had coiled itself around the body of the prince Appia, still alive, and Densu saw it bare its fangs to destroy Appia. In halfawake nightmare state he was in, Densu had only seen the body of the prince. But at the moment when the beast was on the point of sinking its fangs into his neck Densu saw Appia's face. It was his own.

There would be no kings if some catastrophe brought all black people together. . . . And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm. That is the choice before every one of us. I myself, I have already chosen. And those who think like me have chosen. We shall be on the side of the whites. That is where the power lies. We have chosen power because we find impotence disgusting.

Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence.

I am saying this is seed time, far from harvest time.

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

If we do not help the whites, we shall be left by the roadside. And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm.