Category: Quoting Others

When I quote others to better express myself.

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Quoting Others

As Serote wrote for his friend Don, for my friend Don–

 

For Don M. – Banned
Mongane Wally Serote
it is a dry white season
dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth,
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire
indeed it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.
————–
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickenson
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Quoting Others Worldly Fragments

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

While chatting to Safiyyah a couple of days ago, a highly edifying discussion, as many of our interactions go, we somehow came up to the invasiveness of mobile instant messaging services like Mxit. While the Mxit service has had its fair share of bad press, the service is phenomenally successful. It aims to secure five per cent of the world’s GSM subscriptions to its services within the next five years. It’s cheap, accessible and essentially, it is the indispensable toy of a socially-inept generation. A generation who attend a wedding, traditionally an opportunity to meet other people or enjoy the company of people you do know in a congenial atmosphere, only to veil themselves with their mobile telephones, a generation who throng to to the local Nescafe in numbers, only for each to unsheathe their phone as they are seated, and then grudgingly acknowledge the waitress, frowning on her invasion of the bubble in which they live. Safiyyah rightly asks, “Do you want people with you wherever you are?”

But I wonder too, if that’s it- do services like Mxit, or even social networking sites like facebook, rescue us from a sense of isolation? 

Steven G. Jones’ Virtual Culture- Identity and Communication in Cybersociety- which although written in the late nineties, is a fascinting treatise on the two sides to the impact of technology in society :

” …It seems quite commonplace to us that every technology has two sides to its consequences, on the one hand for every technology we develop in an attempt to improve life, we believe we also will on the other hand, find life impoverished in some way. Such has been our experience with a variety of technologies, from nuclear power, with its capacity for generating electricity and for destruction, to the written word, with its capacity for preservation and dissemination of information and for its origination of silent readers. Once we are accustomed to a new technology we accept both sides, preferring, one suspects, to assume that as the technology is refined its negative consequences will also be better engineered.”

 

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Getting Personal Quoting Others

Dream Life/Real Life

 

We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way,
love conquers all,
that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe,
And at the 11th hour,
something gloriously triumphant will
prevent the worst before it happens.
Justin Brooks Atkinson
Years ago, during a drive through Pretoria, as it was, I watched, fascinated, as throngs of people braved inclement weather to file into the nearest corner store, to buy lottery tickets for what was at the time, a record jackpot. Inside the car, meanwhile, my uncle and aunt speculated merrily on what they would do with such a loot. I listened, intently, not contributing, until my uncle noticed my silence, and mistaking me for being disapproving, said, ‘It’s dreams that keep people sane, it’s what keeps us all going’.
His words have stayed with me, perhaps mainly, as I later realised, for it being an insight into who I am.
Dream life and Real life, the title of an Olive Schreiner short story, that I studied in high school, resonates with me. I sometimes feel that my dreams amount to a second life, almost, but I know as well, that it is the dream life that makes this grind mill of a real life easier to negotiate.
More than the light at the end of the tunnel, it is the hope for the light, the sheer want for it, that forces us to trudge through the dark.
.
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Quoting Others

Words to live by

“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”

Ben Okri (Nigeria)