Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian writer, poet and essayist whose early years coincided with Ghana’s long battle for Independence. Ayi Kwei Armah was born on October 28, 1939 in Takoradi, Ghana, he is the author of many novels including; the beautiful ones are not yet born (1968), two thousand season (1973), Fragment (1970), the healer (1979), etc.
Armah was a student of Achimota College, Groton School in Massachusetts, Colombia University and Harvard University. Armah first published short story appeared on 1964 edition of the Harvard Advocate.
Here are 15 powerful quotes of Ayi Kwei Armah
15 Powerful Quotes of Ayi Kwei Armah
1. The present is where we get lost; if we forget our past and have no vision of the future.
2. A mind attacked and conquered is guided away from the paths of its own soul.
3.Where I come from revolution is the only creation and the revolutionary the only artist.
4.When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings. there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something
5.Alone, I am nothing, I have nothing. We have power, but we will never see it work, unless we come together to make it work.
6. Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment
7. You have a fullness you need to bring out. It’s not an emptiness you need to cover up with things
8. I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I’ve been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.
9. Others devoted to life will surely find that between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection; that nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers.
10. Poets are band leaders who have failed
11. True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all.
12. How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit.
13. The beauty was in the waking of the powerless. Is it always to be true that it is impossible to have things strong and at the same time beautiful? The famished men need not stay famished. But to gorge themselves in this heartbreaking way consuming, utterly destroying the common promise of their greed, was that ever necessary?
14. The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher’s nothingness.
15. Let us say just that the cycle from birth to decay has been short. Short, brief. But otherwise not at all unusual. And even in the decline into the end there are things that remind the longing mind of old beginnings and hold out the promise of new ones