Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Yvonne Vera

29 quotes

“I must be in touch with the earth. I can never mistake the source of inspiration and energy to be gender, it is something we all share. It is true, however, that one best writes on themes, feelings, and sentiments one is more closely connected with. In this regard I like to think that I am writing. I am a woman. I am writing.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She cried, and the women sang her back to sleep, willing a silence onto her. She defied them with her tiny speech-seeking voice and cried all day and all night until her mother fell asleep.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I doubt that the natives can listen to an old woman like her. What can she tell them? This society has no respect for women, whom they treat like children. A woman has nothing to say in the life of the natives. Nothing at all.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dare was a large clearing in the center of the village. Those who were admitted to the dare knew the power of words. The midwife was also among the shapers of wisdom, who determined the future of the village.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our people know the power of words. It is because of this that they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them, of the humans who controlled and gave birth to them. [... ] The paper is the stranger’s own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is not like the rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are their words.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can words be made still [in writing], without turning into silence? Silence is more to be feared than the agitation of voices.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If speaking is still difficult to negotiate, then writing has created a free space for most women -much freer than speech. The book is bound, circulated, read. It retains its autonomy much more than a woman is allowed in the oral situation.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing, August 11, 2008 https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Spaces-Anthology-Contemporary-African/dp/0435910108
“Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always need to be anchored in such a way that I am inside a character.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted to write beyond the photograph, you know, that frozen image, beyond the date, beyond the fact of her dying. If anything in my book she doesn't die, she departs.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“needed to enter [Nehanda's] mythic consciousness to really be part of it, to share it and to claim it as my own history and my own identity”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What were our lives compared to the survival of the earth on which we stood?”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nehanda holds her silence all day, offering it with the palm of her hand as though it were something solid. She shouts.... closed out the earthly sounds that try to penetrate and disturb her silence.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The land cannot be owned. We cannot give him any land because the land does not belong to the living.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“carrying the current of a roar that reminds them of who they have been in the past, but it is also the comforting voice of a woman, of their mothers whom they trust. Her voice throws them into the future.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said 'yes' haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set out to write them”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Courageous Zimbabwean writer whose books addressed the taboos of her society,27 Apr 2005
“I would not write if I weren’t in search of beauty, if I was doing it only to advance a cause. I care deeply about my subjects, but I want to be consumed by figures of beauty, by story and character. It must be about perfection. Like a basket-maker or a weaver or a hair-plaiter, you are aware of what you are trying to accomplish from the first sentence”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remembering Yvonne Vera,1 August 2012
“I am against silence”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our forefathers crafted a language that made it difficult to address these contentious issues. In African culture, for example, to talk to my father, I bow. If I am announcing that somebody has died, I use a particular language, a particular tone… so as to convey the message. But for subjects like incest and rape… you are not allowed to mention it. Even to your mother, who must pantomime the news if she tells your aunt”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An empty box of matches. A single leather shoe with laces still attached… An inkstand says London. A magnificent metal spoon with a dove embossed on it. Selborne Hotel is written along the broken handle of a ceramic pot”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My tales are tragic, rather than sad, meaning they have a catastrophic force”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I am not writing, which is most of the time… it is as though I am fasting. I am preparing myself. In other words, I no longer know what it is not to be consumed by writing. I anticipate sitting down with a story the way certain women anticipate lovers—with my breath held still, my knees shaking, a tidy room, a clean petticoat, and with no idea how the evening will turn out—in this case the book”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will have had enough intimacies to acquire a general sketch, a thrill, and a confidence. It is the same with books as it is with lovers. If you cannot feel your whole body move towards a book, then you are mostly doodling, or being quite separate from the act of writing. I spend many months between books fasting. I am meditative and spend many hours on my own, with my hunger growing. I love writing; it is a feast for my senses. I write to share this feast with a reader”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Yvonne Vera: Breaking the Silence,23 September 2002
“The work is not their own: it is summoned. The time is not theirs: it is seized. The ordeal is their own.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If not freedom then rhythm.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fumbatha could never be the beginning or end of all her yearning.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nehanda came out of me like a dream. It has the feeling of a dream when I look at it now. And that suited it, because it concerned a myth, a legend. It was a story of spirituality, of ancestors, a mystic consciousness and a history ... so it was much better to write it almost intuitively, out of my consciousness of being an African, as though I were myself a spirit medium, and I was just transferring or conveying the feelings, symbols and images of that. I wrote it at a time when I could write it, the way one might write a folk-song... I wrote it from remembrance, as a witness to my own spiritual history.”
Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source