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The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

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Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Age: 24
Born: 2000
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
Kenya's capital
National
Nostalgia
Puzzlement
Concern
Concerns
Kenyan
Failing
Contradiction
Interacted
Reader
Readers
Nonexistent
Generations
Skin
Failings
Moral
Skins
Contradictions
Past
Carry
Elders
Young
Generation
Continuous

More quotes by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

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I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.
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I do need to find inner tranquillity and get into a zone before I switch on the computer to work on a story. Only after this do I enter the story world, where I meet the characters and, together, we work through the day and night.
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I can edit into infinity. It's such a joy. I'd probably edit until the last word. Until there's only one word left.
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Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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The truth, and nothing but the truth, is that dawn begins with a wrestling match with my soul and a systematic rejection of all the other useful possibilities a day offers. I make obeisance to the story, its characters, and the muse with burnt offerings.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Even if we want to eradicate our ghosts, our dead, our murdered, even if you erase a name and the record of the existence of a person, somebody remembers.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Kenya is an immense land with a capacity for healing.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my faux-oak desk, tap the On button on my Macbook Air, acknowledge the muse, and skip into the world where the story flows over the day and into the night.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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I get turned on by the idea of an essence - finding the essence of the thing.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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I don't think Kenya is the only country that tries to induce amnesia - it seems to be a global phenomenon. But offenses do not die. They do not disappear.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
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Even if you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor