Amos Tutuola

Amos Olatubosun Tutuola Odegbami (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer who wrote books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.

Quotes

The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952)

• 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.
  • Page 9

• ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon.
  • Page 17

• When I completed three and a half years in that town, I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree throne, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age.”
  • pg. 31

• As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”
  • pg. 54

• The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living.
  • Page 84

• Alo is a lie!
  • Page 95

• Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?
  • Page 98

• The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration.
  • page 99

• Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard.
  • page 100

• 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.
  • Chapter 1, page 191

• When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine.
  • Chapter 1, page 193

• This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man.
  • Chapter 1, page 194

• By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground.
  • Chapter 5, page 205

• So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife.
  • Chapter 11, page 213

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954)

• 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.
  • Chapter 1, Page 1

• 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.
  • Chapter 2, Page 9

• 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.
  • Chapter 4, Page 22

External links

• Palm-Wine Drinkard
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts