Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes
I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.
Quotes to Explore
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A few weeks after my mom passed in November of 2013, I came back from an injury and entered the Egg Bowl in the second half against Ole Miss. I'll never forget the feeling when I walked back out on the field. As I walked into the Egg Bowl, the crowd stood up and clapped like they were enveloping me in a giant hug.
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You rarely get satisfaction sitting in an easy chair. If you work in a garden on the other hand, and it yields beautiful tomatoes, that's a good feeling.
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I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.
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Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.
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I must've been a bird in some previous lifetime. I feel like I'm called to flying - the convenience and the beauty of it. That feeling of soaring would be empowering.
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I don't do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn't have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable.
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When you write as a woman, there's this feeling there's going to be a softness.
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Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'
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I always had a feeling when I was a kid that I didn't really know what was going on. Everybody else knew stuff that I didn't know.
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You need to feel that the game is important to you. Lose that feeling and you lose your edge. There's no faking that kind of emotion. You can't invent the feeling. It's got to be natural, real.
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There's something about girls and unicorns that's deep and meaningful. Something about childhood.
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I really hated school. I had the feeling I was losing a lot of time.
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I had always wanted to be on SNL, it's not always great, but it's this leftover childhood dream.
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Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren't supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right.
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I like working on stories where I can explore the darker corners of childhood without illustrations but with humor.
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Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
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When you really work hard for something that you genuinely and truly love, and you don't want it to fail, it's a good feeling to see it do good.
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A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
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I really do feel very lucky. I've had my kids and my relationships. I've set my life down - I'm in my house, and I'm alone with my children - and I'm at peace, and that's a really nice feeling. All I really want in my life is to maintain that.
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I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.
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I've always been optimistic. And I have a feeling that it happened because of going to all those movies with my grandmother in the '40s because there was no cynicism.
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No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
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My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.
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I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.
