William Kamkwamba Quotes

“I try, and I made it!”

“I went to sleep dreaming of Malawi, and all the things made possible when your dreams are powered by your heart.”

“Thinking of them reminds me of a quote I read recently from the great Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that says, “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl.” We must encourage those still struggling to keep moving forward.”

“If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.”

“Don’t insult me today just because I’m poor, you don’t know what my future holds!”

“I didn’t have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.”

“Cool! Where did you get such an idea?” “The library.”

“Whatever you want to do, if you do it with all your heart, it will happen.”

“After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it’s going to grow up strong.”

“Few people realize this, but cutting down the trees is one of the things that keeps us Malawians poor.”

“Although Geoffrey, Gilbert and I grew up in this small place in Africa, we did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials. And talking with friends I’ve met from America and Europe, I now know this is true. Children everywhere have similar ways of entertaining themselves. If you look at it this way, the world isn’t so big.”

“No matter how foreign and lonely the world outside, the books always reminded me of home.”

“My grandmother Rose was a tough woman, so tough she’d built the family home with her own hands while my grandpa worked as a tailor in the market. She’d even built the furnace and molded the bricks herself, which is not an easy job, and even today, not the job of a woman.”

“Everyone has the same hunger, son. We must learn to forgive”