Maryse Condé > Quotes

“The truth always arrive too late because it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail's pace.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Life is too kind to men, whatever their color.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“They hanged my mother. I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk cotton tree. She had committed a crime for which there is no pardon. She had struck a white man. She had not killed him, however. In her clumsy rage she had only managed to gash his shoulder”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Everyone believes he can fashion a witch to his way of thinking so that she will satisfy his ambitions, dreams, and desires...”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“How true! Life's problems are like trees. We see the trunk, we see the branches and the leaves. But we can't see the roots, hidden deep down under the ground. And yet it is their shape and nature and how far they dig into the slimy humus to search for water that we need to know. Then perhaps we would understand.”
― Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove

“We were in Africa". I know, I know. What were we doing there? We must have lived, somehow. Eaten, slept, raised children? Was it so savage and horrible that it is netter forgotten? Who can tell me? No one. Because nobody knows and everyone takes for granted what they've been told.”
― Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon

“There was one thing, however, that I didn’t know: evil is a gift received at birth. There’s no acquiring it. Those of us who have not come to this world armed with spurs and fangs are losers in every combat.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub ointments on my dry, cracked, skin, which had become like a badly tanned hide. Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Who laughs in front of a gun? Only those of our species.”
― Maryse Condé

“Those of you who have read my tale up till now must be wondering who is this witch devoid of hatred, who is mislead each time by the wickedness in men’s hearts? For the nth time I made up my mind to be different and fight it out tooth and nail. But how to work a change in my hear and coat its lining with snake venom? How to make it into a vessel for bitter and violent feelings? To get it to love evil? Instead I could only feel tenderness and compassion for the disinherited and a sense of revolt against injustice.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“But when I heard that this old man, who went from accuser to being the accused, had been staked out on his back in a field and the deputies had piled stone upon stone on his chest, it made me wonder about the kind of people who were convicting us. Where was Satan? Wasn’t he hiding in the folds of the judges’ coats? Wasn’t he speaking in the voices of these magistrates and men of religion?”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.”
― Maryse Condé, Victoire: My Mother's Mother

“It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, anbodoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the Morne à Cayes. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.”
― Maryse Condé

“It's true I have a stay-at-home nature. I abhor physical exercise (except for making love, of course). I've always believed that sport should be left to the dunces.”
― Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon

“There was no denying the fact that the death of sugarcane was sounding the knell for something else in the country. What can we call it?”
― Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove

“Time drags. Time is a monster with a neck bloated with blood.”
― Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon

“I must confess the word race is now obsolete and we should quickly replace it by another.”
― Maryse Condé, The Gospel According to the New World

“...if you've eaten your fill since childhood, you've plenty of time to think of love and nothing else.”
― Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon

“You don't cross a mangrove. You'd spike yourself on the roots of the mangrove trees. You'd be sucked down and suffocated by the brackish mud.”
― Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove

“En John Indien havia tornat a casa de'n Deacon Ingersoll i el meu llit era buit i fred com la tomba que alguns ja em cavaven. Vaig descórrer les cortines i vaig veure la lluna, asseguda com una amazona al mig del cel. Una bufanda de núvols se li va lligar al coll i el cel de la vora es va tornar de color de tinta.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Não pertenço à civilização do Livro e do Ódio. É dentro do coração que os meus guardarão minha memória, sem necessidade de grafia alguma. É dentro da cabeça. Em seu coração e em sua cabeça.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Eu já havia me arrependido de ter apenas, em todo esse caso, interpretado um papel de comparsa, rapidamente esquecida e cujo destino não interessava a ninguém. "Tituba, uma escrava de Barbados que provavelmente praticava hoodoo." Algumas linhas em longos tratados dedicados aos eventos de Massachusetts. Por que eu deveria ser ignorada? Essa questão também atravessou meu espírito. É porque ninguém se preocupa com uma negra, com seus sofrimentos e suas tribulações? É isso?
Eu procuro a minha história junto às histórias das Bruxas de Salem e não a encontro.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Comecei a duvidar seriamente da convicção fundamental de Man Yaya, segundo a qual a vida era um presente. A vida só seria um presente se cada um de nós pudesse escolher o ventre que nos carregaria. Mas, ser jogado na carne de uma miserável, de uma egoísta, de uma cadela que se vingará de nós pelos reveses de sua própria vida, de ser parte da horda de explorados, dos humilhados, daqueles que são obrigados a um nome, a uma língua, a crenças, ah, que calvário!”
― Maryse Condé, Eu, Tituba: Bruxa negra de Salem

“Solitude is my companion. She has cradled and nourished me. She has never left me up to this very day. People talk and talk but they don’t know what it’s like to emerge burning hot from the stone-cold womb of your mother, to say farewell to her from the very first moment you enter this world.”
― Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove

“Waar eindigde zijn geloof en waar begonnen de komedie en de berekening?”
― Maryse Condé, Ségou 1. De aarden wallen 2. De verkruimelde aarde