Quotes from Maryse Condé

The truth always arrive too late because it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail's pace.

Life is too kind to men, whatever their color.

Everyone believes he can fashion a witch to his way of thinking so that she will satisfy his ambitions, dreams, and desires...

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

Who laughs in front of a gun? Only those of our species.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Time drags. Time is a monster with a neck bloated with blood.

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.

I must confess the word race is now obsolete and we should quickly replace it by another.

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?

Waar eindigde zijn geloof en waar begonnen de komedie en de berekening?

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.

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.

if you've eaten your fill since childhood, you've plenty of time to think of love and nothing else.