One Day I Will Write About This Place Quotes

“International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find...”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“There is an ache in my chest today, sweet, searching, and painful, like a tongue that is cut and tingles with sweetness and pain after eating a strong pineapple.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“It is an aspect of Kenya I am always acutely aware of - and crave, because I don't have it all. My third language, Gikuyu, is nearly non-existent; I can't speak it. It is a phantom limb...”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“He has money. She will wear the mask he needs.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“Si en la idea de vivir hay algún milagro, es que podemos existir durante una temporada desafiando al caos”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“There are dissidents everywhere. We have to all unite and silence the dissidents. From the radio, we know that foreign influenzes are invecting us, secret foreign influenzes are infringing us, invincing us, perferting our gildren, preaking our gultural moralities, our ancient filosofies, the dissidents are bushing and bulling, pringing segret Kurly Marxes, and Michael Jagsons, making us backliding robots, and our land is becoming moonar handscapes.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“I meet online and make friends with a young Nigerian woman, Chimamanda Adichie, who is also trying to get published. We critique each other’s work. Soon, we are e-mailing every day.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

“Science is smaller than music, than the patterns of the body; the large confident world of sound and body gathers. If my mind and body are quickening, lagging behind is a rising anxiety of words.”
― Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place