Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.
Quotes to Explore
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We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give alcohol to kids.
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Comfort and luxury are usually the chief requirements of life for your ego - its top priorities tend to be accumulations, achievements, and the approval of others.
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There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.
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We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is.
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When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.
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When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
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I pass by that it is very culpable to be facetious in obscene and smutty matters.
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Keep your energy levels high by adding bananas and egg whites to your diet.
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It is my hope that I will be able to work with legislative leaders on both sides of the aisle and Gov. Hickenlooper to find a solution to fix our ailing pension system.
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I just take it one day at a time. Austin Powers has given me a lot of opportunities as far as my career.
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I've always been extremely physical. I was a gymnast for 15 years, and then I was a dancer for nine, so I was kind of looking for these parts. But we have a tendency in Denmark not to do many action films.
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Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
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A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.
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Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
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Redheads were particularly persecuted during the European witch trials of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The colour was associated with the devil, and the pale skin which most redheads have was thought unnatural and deathly.
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As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.
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The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.
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One of my biggest drawbacks is my inability to maintain my physique. I put on weight for 'Soodhu Kavvum' and never managed to shed it. Luckily, that look suited a few films, including 'Orange Mittai.'
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I think when people talk about civil liberties, they sometimes forget that action taken to protect the citizen against physical violence and physical attack is a blow in favour and not a blow against civil liberties.
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To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.
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... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.
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Jesus said love one another. He didn't say love the whole world.
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Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.
