A Quote by Petina Gappah

The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably 'Dew in the Morning', an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated 'Strife,' in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection 'Can We Talk?'

Petina Gappah

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Books Boyhood Cast Collection Colonial Dew Exploration Idyllic Morning Most Number Past Present Prolific Rich Rural Shadows Short Sins Sophisticated Story Strife Striking Talk Varied Which Written

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Petina Gappah
Zimbabwean - Writer
Born: 1971

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.

Greg Weisman

Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.

Gregory Benford

DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.

Justin Cartwright

In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.

Gillian Flynn

'Get Skinny' is my sixth book. I look over the books that I've written, and my subject matters are varied, and I write books pertaining to that which I'm dealing with at the moment.

Suzanne Somers

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

For my 50th birthday, my cousin Helmut gave me the most profound, beautiful, and striking present. He made books out of my dad's slide photographs, which were stored and forgotten. Looking at those books made me cry.

Juergen Teller

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

Past and present, it is all the same, books are necromancers, they exercise an influence more varied, more lasting, than any magic known to man.

Holbrook Jackson

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

Stephen Graham Jones

Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.

Martin McDonagh

Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.

Alan Watts

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

Rick Perlstein

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

Annie Besant

I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.

Nalo Hopkinson

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Quote by Petina Gappah

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