Poets From Nigeria

"A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life."

"This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down."

"One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us."

"When I woke up I found myself in a coffin. My parents had given me up for dead. They had commenced the burial proceedings when they heard my fierce weeping. Because of my miraculous recovery they named me a second time and threw a party which they couldn’t afford.They named me Lazaro. But as I became the subject of much jest, and as many were uneasy with the connection between Lazaro and Lazarus, Mum shortened my name to Azaro."

"The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you."

"Learn to drink, my son. A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life."

""How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay."

"You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone."

"In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the Living. They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn’t redeemed, all that they hadn’t understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins."

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger."

"In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry."

"Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard."

"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger."

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering."

"Inverse of the word live is evil."

"Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind."

"What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?"

"Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories."

"To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness."

"If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom."

"Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive."

"What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things."

"Responsibility is active. Vigilant. Actions become character and character becomes destiny. . .the moment you see something is wrong, you have a responsibility."

"Be like the tortoise- grow a hard shell to protect your strong heart. Be like the eagle- soar above your pain and carry the banner and the wonder of our lives to the farthest corners of the world. Build your strength. Destiny is difficult."

"Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs."

"Craft is important. The greater the idea, the greater the craft you need."

"Quiet people are the most dangerous."

"For your reflections reflect on the things you do. And the things you do reflect on you."

"If your work can surprise you then you have started something worthwhile."

"So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite… The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss."

"Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes."

"I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality."

"When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are."

"I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you."

"I still pay tribute to my English teacher, Mrs. Ore Cole, who taught me how to become a writer. It makes you wiser and more intelligent. When you read a lot you eventually want to become a writer."

"I think there is no one of us who can boast of having telescopic eyes. But when you read, books become your telescopic eyes. You will see the whole world through the books you have been reading. And you become wiser. If you don’t read any book at all, you will rarely develop."

"when I wrote My Father’s Daughter, some people said it was too good to be true; but it couldn’t be too good to be true, because if you set your mind in good things, you will do good things."

"Some people who didn’t have better fathers said it was fiction. I said, ‘Well. if you didn’t have the kind of father that I had then there is no point in trying to belittle my own father. My father was a great man'."

"When you write children’s literature, you write for different ages."

"I like to revise my works to be as near perfect as possible."

"The beauty of poetry shouldn’t be in how well the poet hides meaning between the lines. It should be in how easily he makes his readers discover them. A poem does not have to be difficult to be profound; ‘simple’ and ‘profound’ are not mutually exclusive."

"“Your Father Walks Like a Crab”"

"Find Someone To Grow Old With, And You’ll Never Grow Old. Find A Cause To Live For, And You’ll Never Die"

"He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present."

"Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species? I don’t know, I’m not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don’t shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said. I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should. Yes,"

"“blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were—those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse."

"Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time."

"He stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent yet beautiful at the same time? he wondered. He hadn’t known about the poverty and violence of Lagos until he arrived. It was as if people conspired with the city to weave a web of silence around its unsavoury parts."

""Elvis! Elvis! Wake up. It’s past six in de morning and all your mates are out dere looking for work,” his father, Sunday, said. “What work, sir? I have a job.” “Dancing is no job. We all dance in de bar on Saturday. Open dis bloody door!” Sunday shouted."

""This is the kola nut. This seed is a star. This star is life. This star is us"."