Yoruba People

"Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met."

"Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?"

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy."

"WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float."

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone."

"Sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few."

"EACH PERSON MUST, ON SOME LEVEL, TAKE HIMSELF AS THE CALIBRATION point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic."

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables.”"

"Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”"

"I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”"

"There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories."

"Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews."

"the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique."

"They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left school. Plagiarism? The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had me on September 20, 2001..That was the year I lost my illusions about Europe."

"All your shrines drenched in the blood Of your worshippers/All your sacred symbols wiped out by fire!"

"Nowadays, when the strong fight the weak, it's called a Liberation War to free the weak from oppression."

"Nowadays, in the new world, it is suicide to be weak."

"I ask you- without a shrine, without worshippers, what is a god?"

"When fate decided to strike you down, what amount of crying can help?"

"It's us, not the gods, who created war. It's us, we human beings, who can kill it."

"The gods are out to punish human beings who she claims ‘learn only from suffering and pain."

"The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living."

"Alo is a lie!"

"Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?"

"The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration."

"Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard."

"I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life."

"When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine."

"This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man."

"By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground."

"So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife."

"I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays."

"But I did not know that all that I was thinking in mind was going to the hearing of the inhabitants of these three rooms, so at the same moment that I wanted to move my body to go the room from which the smell of the African’s food was rushing to me […] there I saw that these three rooms which had no doors and windows opened unexpectedly and three kinds of ghosts peeped at me, every one of them pointed his finger to me to come to him."

"Performed a juju which changed me to a horse unexpectedly, then he put reins into my mouth and tied me on a stump with a thick rope."

"As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”"

"When I completed three and a half years in that town, I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree throne, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age.”"

"ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon."

"Old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said I would find out where my palm-wine tapster who had died was."

"It’s funny how you don’t realise that you’ve been missing something until you see it in the flesh."

"People take the sky for granted, they don’t look up enough"

"I want everybody within the university and beyond to be reaching for the stars.To work out what works for them, what they love and to have a career in that area, because if you work at what you love it's hardly working at all."

"Know your strengths and weaknesses and work towards your strengths and improve your weaknesses and have that crazy dream that will drive you on. There will always be people who will tell you that you can’t do something or that a certain path is not for you, but work out what you can do and go for it."

"Heidi is what got me started in reading."

"Dreams don’t show up on government surveys or school league tables, but they are the fuel that makes us want to get up and get on. For young people to feel that the low road is the only one available to them is nonsense. We won’t climb out of recession, or meet the challenges of climate change, by thinking small."

"I want to inspire the next generation of scientists, and especially girls, and let them know that STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] is for them."