Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the shared experience of depression and the importance of connection with others who feel similarly.
Wole Soyinka expresses a realization that upon leaving a situation, he encountered individuals who shared his feelings of depression and pessimism. This highlights the commonality of struggles with mental health and emphasizes the significance of seeking out connections with others who face similar challenges, fostering understanding and support towards a better future.
In practice
In a mental health awareness event, this quote could highlight the importance of community support.
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.
Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.
It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.
You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting... you.
I feel most people’s sexuality is enormously complicated. That’s what it means to be human. Wouldn’t it be great if we honored that complexity rather than turn it into gossip or ridicule? Wouldn’t it be great if we accepted sexual diversity, in ourselves and others, without condemning it?
Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.
I feel that women - without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero - indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.
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