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Nuruddin Farah
81 quotes
“There’s a lot of things that you internalise when something is happening right in front of you. Your emotion is raw”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Studying dictatorship and writing about it and analysing it is something that requires either madness or bravery”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had had enough experience of how society was dealing with my mother, how society was dealing with my sisters. How we, men, were being given privileges that girls were being given no chances to entertain”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wasn’t doing it because I was feminist but because fair is fair”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I generally do not like to justify a text, a text speaks for itself”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The absence of the patriarch creates a matriarch who then represents that traditional oppressive system”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It wasn’t given the name ‘patriarchy’ when I was fighting that interference. I just knew this thing took a physical form and an ideological form, therefore I had to fight both”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because you cannot torture the mind of a person, they torture the body”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could not write in Somali because I became a known person in Somalia—my name could not be mentioned in the newspaper and I could not be quoted in the newspaper in Somali. So I was left with no choice but to continue writing in English.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The majority of writers in Africa, of us, confine ourselves, rather than having great ambition”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps it was my generation interested in dictatorship and not the younger ones”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I come from a place where I question tradition. I come from a place where I say the elders have mucked up everything. I’m an aberration.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When people mention my name, it is respected, but not many people have any idea what my work is really about”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a dual lineage to which Africans belong and that makes it easy: if you know African tradition you know Christianity”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My real true feeling is that Somalis are the least religious people on earth. How could anyone manage the destructiveness of Somalis towards one another? The killings that have been committed, the massacres within the country. If they believed in God, as truly as they should, they would not commit such atrocities among each other, especially among fellow Muslims. Therefore I question their honesty when they talk about religion, it is lip service that they pay to the faith”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a character said something, I am not the one who said it!”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The majority of writers in Africa, of us, confine ourselves, rather than having great ambition’—An interview with Nuruddin Farah, by Lebohang Mojapelo 10 April 2020
“Honestly, I don’t succumb to racism. I can understand somebody disliking me for some reason or another but somebody playing racist games with me it doesn’t make sense because I told you, you know, from a small age I was told you’re the greatest . . .which means “there is no one better than you”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“one has to be very cognizant of the fact that you can’t get away with mistakes.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 5 Interesting Things We Learned About Nuruddin Farah from His Recent Interview 3 November 2023
“‘We must respect the individual for who they are and not where they are from”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you send your dog out and it bites someone, you take responsibility”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What no one can reconstruct is the idea that was in our hearts, because there is mistrust among the people”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nuruddin Farah in conversation with Binyavanga Wainaina 2018
“I learned that the creation of a text was a process that required time, thinking, ingenuity, and self-trust.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A major writer is one who has a greater vision than she or he is capable of capturing immediately”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my great mission in life became one of keeping Somalia alive by continuing to write about it; by turning it into a debate; by making Somalia intelligible to others, including Somalis.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a novelist, I usually think of myself as somebody who imagines that there are no secrets worth keeping, no taboo areas in human life”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I kept asking myself this question: What is worth being killed for?”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I take great pleasure in telling people I am a Somali”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The one thing that disturbs me, keeps me awake, gives me nightmares, is this falsehood we tell ourselves all the time: denying that we had anything to do with it”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am willing to say that I, too, am an accomplice in the ruin of Somalia.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether I conceived these works in Somali or in English, I will still remain the same person, and the ideas that informed my writing would have been the same”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While many other people still found it perplexing how Somali society treated women, for me it was and continues to be an invitation to dig deeper into the constitution of Somali culture”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The language is not the main issue; rather the key is, in the end, the ideas that carry the book”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What exile has done for me is that it has somehow freed me from the family constraint”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve always thought that society could not be considered free, democratic, developed, let alone “civilized,” when a large segment is kept out of the mainstream of politics and life”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“women ought to be given a central position in the life of the nation”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The leadership of Somalia ought to be placed in the hands of women and sympathizers to the causes of women in view of the fact we—the male society—have failed”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The current situation seems to underscore that women have proven to be far hardier than men”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“until you accept that you are a criminal and ask for forgiveness from your God, your Creator, from the society at large, then I cannot accept you to be in a position of influence and power”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right people for the new situation. What I am saying to you is this: Why is it that the people who are accomplices in the ruin of Somalia are still being asked to lead it? You cannot ask someone who destroyed a house, who burnt it down, to reconstruct it”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no value in having two million Somalis who are at the bottom of every society they join”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no use in those who continue talking about Somalia, gabbing about Somalia, without doing anything for themselves. Let them make something out of themselves, and maybe they will then do good for the rest”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any human activity that involves more than two persons, and that touches on a topic that involves a third and a fourth party, is a political affair”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No writer can help another writer write”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These young people are the only hope that we have, especially the ones who have the opportunity to take control of their lives”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t like very much any writer who ruins an opportunity by taking belated and transient political sides”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know if I'm a nomad as much as a mover-about”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if I can't come back home then I will make the rest of Africa my country.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there must be a reservoir of imagined and remembered details in one's memory”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if I am standing on the ground, I will not be able to see the ground I am standing on - as much as I can see the ground I am not standing on”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm usually very lucky in not having to bother about looking after the books; the books can look after themselves.”
Nuruddin Farah (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source