Top 15 Lesley Lokko Quotes

It wasn't sealed - she opened the flap. Inside was a cheque for a thousand dollars. Made out to her. From Daniel. It was a colossal slap in the face.

Guilt, Ameline discovered, was a terrible, unruly think, like toothache - dull nagging, persistent, never far from attention. Just when you got used to its rumbling, ruminating presence, it would lash out, stike you down, stio you dead in your tracks. The worst thing was, it was entirely unpredictable.

She would love it. Just as he loved her. He paused for a second, his fingers touching the door handle. He was in love. The realisation came to him quite suddenly.

How could you teach someone to survive? You pointed them in the right direction and hoped they'd swim, not sink. Waving, not drowning. There are more important things in life than individual happiness. It was an easy trap to fall into, mistaking a lack of self-direction for an expression of love.

The glow of delicioous tension coudn't be faked, not at any price. So when you leave, that's when you realise you've been living in a lie.

You have to find yourself. When you meet him again, you have to know who you are. He's finding out who he is.

Change is the one thing that everybody hollers for and longs for, but when it actually arrives, most people don't want it. It's a complex thing.

The dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only.

All futures are uncertain. We do our best to anticipate the future.

Africa's unique context, which is both richly challenging and richly creative, means it's a powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century – climate change, societal change, demographic change, new forms of governance, explosive urbanity.

Succession is something you make, by constructing opportunities.

No job is worth one’s life.

Architects have the power to change the culture of how we build and how we think about resources.

There’s something about the training of an architect that’s particularly suited to our time: it’s about bringing disparate pieces of information together in a framework. Architecture is about more than building buildings.

I’ve always thought of ‘race’ as a powerfully creative category of exploration and expression. I was fed up trying to find a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture that wasn’t only about poverty and ‘informality,’ a word I loathe.