Amos Tutuola

“But (all sat quietly and paid great attention to me) when I first saw the whole of you, I was afraid, but after I thought it over again my fear was expelled. Because I first thought within myself that where to get sufficient planks to make coffins for every one of you when you die because you are too many. But when I thought it over again, I remembered that not the whole of you would need coffins to bury you when you die.”

“After a few months that I had returned from my first journey in which I had been changed into an image for the period of two years. I thought over one midnight that although, I had met much difficulties, etc., in my first journey, but yet, I had not experienced it as much as of those old people. Because if an old man tells all his difficulties, hardships, losses, etc., which he had met before he becomes old. Many young men would prefer to die while young just to avoid these things.”

“Performed a juju which changed me to a horse unexpectedly, then he put reins into my mouth and tied me on a stump with a thick rope.”

“But I did not know that all that I was thinking in mind was going to the hearing of the inhabitants of these three rooms, so at the same moment that I wanted to move my body to go the room from which the smell of the African’s food was rushing to me […] there I saw that these three rooms which had no doors and windows opened unexpectedly and three kinds of ghosts peeped at me, every one of them pointed his finger to me to come to him.”

“I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays.”

“I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.”

“The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration.”

“Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?”

“The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living.”

“ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon.”

“Old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said I would find out where my palm-wine tapster who had died was.”

““We used to tell folktales to our schoolmates and teachers. Each time we got our holiday, I used to go to my people in the village. There was no radio or television, but our source of amusement was to tell folktales after dinner. I used to listen to old people and the folktales they told. Each time I returned to school, I told the story to other schoolmates and I became a very good storyteller. They used to give me presents for telling incredible folktales.””

“So many people ask me, but I don’t know what…er, how I can answer it, because a person who does something for people – not a bad thing o! – will not say this is the best, and that is the best. So I take all my books; I put the same interest in them because when I am writing, I am always happy.”