P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

By Mokokoma Mokhonoana

"New Year's resolutions are a consolation for it being impossible for us to really start our lives afresh."

 

"Prostitutes hire out one tiny portion of their bodies. Employees sell countless huge portions of their lives."

 

"Almost every married woman did not really want to be married by her man. They merely wanted to be married … and by a man."

 

"A true believer in God prays only to thank, never to ask; and welcomes, with open arms, every single thing that is happening."

 

"Most relationships and marriages that are older than 3 years owe their not having ended to compromise, trust, forgiveness, etc., good communication, and great lies."

 

AND 300+ OTHER APHORISMS

 

Mokokoma is a rare breed. Although most of his sentences leave one with the painful task of thinking, and many of them show or remind us that we human beings are not as smart and not as important to existence as we think we are, you are way more likely to come across, in a daytime, many readers who like him, than you are to come across, in your lifetime, a few writers who are like him.

 

Mokokoma is a keen observer, an insightful and original thinker, and a wordsmith and a satirist of note. Many of his sentences are each way more intellectually rewarding than not a few collections of a thousand randomly selected books.

 

As you are about to find out, if you haven't, Mokokoma Mokhonoana wrote many of the most profound, many of the most memorable, many of the most hilarious, and many of the most thought-provoking sentences that will ever be written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sekoala Publishing Company (Pty) Ltd
• Release date: Jan 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781920703677

Book preview

Contents

Why I Write

Aphorisms

Back Matter

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays.

— Karl Kraus

Why I Write

I

Unlike writers such as George Orwell, who apparently knew when he was about five years old, I did not know from a very early age that when I grew up I should be a writer. What’s more, I, unlike many a writer, do not believe that that I write and that about which I write were determined by my early development.

Although I had seen books, newspapers, and magazines pretty much every single day since my very first day of school, I do not remember thinking—before I became a teenager—about the production of the words found in those publications. Indeed, doing that would have probably left me knowing, before I was pushed into teenagehood, not only that some people have produced those words to please not their teachers but their landlords, but also that I could, should I so desire, someday produce, like them, bunches of sentences that are not written for marks.

I do not remember thinking about that, not because my memory is failing me, but because I always failed to think beyond the meanings of those sentences. That is how ignorant with regard to writing I was when I was a child. Believe it or not, that the sentences in those books, newspapers, and magazines were probably not written by schoolchildren had never crossed my mind at that time. During those early years of my life, writing seemed to me to be something that schoolchildren had to do and to endure in order to please their teachers and their parents.

As might have been expected, I did not aspire to be a writer when I was growing up. As a matter of fact, I have never aspired to be a writer.

While some people’s childhoods made it more likely for them to aspire to be writers, mine definitely had the opposite effect: (1) I had never seen, until the very last years of my childhood, someone reading for pleasure, nor had I ever heard that some people do; (2) The number that one would get if one were to add the number of children’s books that were bought for me and that of those that were lent to me is less than one; (3) I have never kept a diary, and was already a teenager when I finally became aware of the fact that some people have a book in which they write things such as their thoughts, experiences, and feelings; and (4) I was never read a bedtime story—when I was about eleven, I did not even know that some children are read stories at bedtime, and that bedtime stories are verbal sedatives: sleeping pills made of words, and consumed through the ear.

I had absolutely no idea at that time that it would, but the momentous incident that eventually led to me being something that eventually led to me being a writer took place during my penultimate year of high school, a few months after I had turned sixteen.

I do not remember who it was, but someone—one of my then classmates, if I remember correctly—recommended either that I study copywriting, or a college that offered that course. (I suspect the latter to be the case, because not only did I not love or even like writing, I was barely average when it came to writing, which was not surprising for the barely average student I was and had always been.) A few months before the aforementioned life-changing incident, I enthusiastically completed and then—with probably the highest degree of confidence I will ever have—immediately submitted the copywriting challenge and application form from the aforementioned college. And, fortunately, my application was rejected.

Anyway, let us get back to that momentous incident.

I was with about four of my then classmates, slowly walking from our school to the taxi rank, thirty or so minutes after we wrote one of our final exams for the eleventh grade. Like probably the vast majority of our classmates, we were talking about the exam. We mainly talked about how difficult it was and the questions that we strongly believed we had answered correctly. That lasted for about fifteen minutes. We then started talking about careers. And, as a result, one of the four or so guys I was with ended up telling us—with pride—that his cousin’s husband is a graphic designer, and that he—as part of and because of his job—makes many cool things and a lot of money.

That was the second time that that job title entered my mind. (The first being my seeing it on the list of courses that were at that time offered by the college that rejected that application of mine.) Although he told us that his cousin’s husband has designed a logo for some big organization, we, like our classmate, did not know much about what being a graphic designer entailed. Be that as it may, we were definitely impressed—probably because we bought his claim that the graphic designer in question was making a lot of money from graphic design.

Fast-forward to the first week of 2003, the year that followed the year that