Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of words and language within cultural development.
Wole Soyinka reflects on his upbringing in an environment where language and communication were foundational to cultural identity and understanding. This statement highlights the significance of words not just as tools for communication, but as vital components that shape culture, knowledge, and human connections.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of language in education.
Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.
We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its national conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
One of the things I'm best at is modeling. I find someone who is best at something I want to learn. Then I model them, and learn it myself. Then, when I've proven it to myself, I teach it to others.
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