Margaret Ogola

Margaret Ogola in 1999

Margaret Atieno Ogola (12 June 1958 – 21 September 2011) was a Kenyan Catholic novelist.

Quotes

The River and the Source (1994)

• A home without daughters is like a spring without a source
  • Part 1, Chapter 1 p. 2.

• Her therapy was simple for there is no greater psychologist than the one who graduates from the hard school of life.
  • Part 1, Chapter 9, p. 51

• How can you know where you are going if you do not know where you are coming from?
  • Part 1, Chapter 11, p. 66

• You may be twice my size, but I have three times your courage
  • Part 1, Chapter 12, p. 74

• Bitterness is poison to the spirit for it breeds nothing but vipers some of which might consume your very self. Pain and sorrow all humans feel; but bitterness drops on the spirit like aloes—causing it to wither.
  • Part 2, Ch 1, pp. 83-84

• All the fears of her childhood were coming back. There was a vice-like band around her head and she thought she would faint. In her head one thought went round and round, beating its wings like a trapped bird. “My child - not you, not you!
  • Part 2, Ch 6, p. 107

• Though she was very wise, one could hardly say that she had been born in the wrong era; that had she lived in a different era, she would have been a great intellectual, a pioneer and a leader of humanity. In truth, such clarity of vision and strength of person are a discomfiture to all men of all ages and she would therefore never have really fitted in that, this or any other century; for human beings prefer to be left alone to muddle along in confusion—it is more comfortable than to suffer the pain of self knowledge.
  • Part 2, Ch 8, p. 116

• The women’s halls of residence, ‘the Box’ as it was known, was the hunting ground for all and sundry, and big cars were very evident especially on Saturdays when well dressed, well-to-do men descended upon the place. It was the thing to have a girl friend on campus…there were two categories of girls—the fast-moving "Mercedes" types and the "clipboards.
  • Part 3, Ch 8, p. 175

• He’d better be careful; I hear there is a disease called AIDS waiting to pounce on any careless person these days
  • Part 4, Ch 3, p. 217

• I have heard rumours also; but most say it is just Western propaganda. Anyway you doctors can do miracles these days. A mere VD cannot elude a cure for too long.
  • Part 4, Ch 3, p. 217

• You must realize that little irritations become more glaring, when there is that basic difference…I can’t imagine anything more annoying than their talking to their son, and your children, in a language you cannot understand. It makes you even more of an outsider than you are already.
  • Part 4, Ch 3, p. 219