Yam quotes by topic: Food and yams, Yams features, Natives and yams, People and yams, Death and yams, Me and yams, Potatoes and yams, Gardening and yams.
Food and yams
A great part of their food consists of wild yams ( Dioscorea ), which they dig when they have nothing to give to the trader for rice. (Edgar Thurston)
Finally, a dozen large yams, of yellow and savory pulp, were cooking in the ashes, and exhaled a fine odor. (Eugène Sue)
Turtles and oysters were now produced in astonishing numbers; and on these and yams the people made a hearty meal. (Charles Dickens)
After all these years, my favourite food is my mother’s butter bean stew with whole potatoes, yam and dasheen. (Benjamin Zephaniah)
I hate cooking. But I do make the candied yams every year at Thanksgiving. And they’re awesome! You could definitely get diabetes and cavities from them, but they’re delicious! (Marlon Wayans)
I wasn’t eating the right kinds of calories. I didn’t know about healthy carbs such as brown rice and lentils. Now I eat small meals throughout the day: oatmeal with cinnamon to start, fruit and yogurt as a snack, and vegetables or with chicken or tuna, and a healthy carb, like a yam, for lunch. (Alison Sweeney)
Yams features
He [Hughes] says that the word yam means “to eat,” in several negro dialects on the coast of Guinea. (Alphonse De Candolle)
The yam species are climbing plants, with handsome foliage, of the simplest culture, which succeed well in any light, rich, or sandy soil, and are readily increased by dividing the tuberous roots. (P.L. Simmonds)
The stem of the yam is climbing, herbaceous, furnished with opposite or alternate leaves, cut into hearts, which release flower spikes from their axils, male on one foot, female on another. (Raynal)
The yams, monocotyledonous plants, belonging to the family Dioscorideæ, constitute the genus Dioscorea, of which botanists have described about two hundred species, scattered over all tropical and sub-tropical countries. They usually have rhizomes, that is, underground stems or branches of stems, more or less fleshy, which become larger when the annual, exposed part of the plant is near its decay. (Alphonse De Candolle)
Natives and yams
The principal vegetable cultivated by the natives is the yam, with which they are particularly successful. (Robert Huish)
In our presence, he distributed to some of his women yams that he had just picked. (René Caillié)
Pretty little huts, and diligently cultivated fields of taro, yam, and potatoes, soon adorned the wilderness. (Otto von Kotzebue)
There are two chief men, and they do not look like the others. They have blue eyes like you, and they are devils…. They do not pay us for our yams, and taro, and breadfruit. They take everything from us, and if we complain they kill us. (Jack London)
People and yams
Old yam digger please explain this mountain’s sorrows. (Basho Matsuo)
Yams are a symbol of masculinity, and a man who had enough yams to feed his family from one harvest to the next certainly deserved great respect. (Chinua Achebe)
If one whose authority is uncontested says “yam” no one will dare to answer “cassava”, unless he goes to cook his cassava elsewhere. (Massa Makan Diabaté)
Most people who lose their lives because life might be down for them only refuse to know what a tuber of yam that is put into the soil goes through before it comes up as a fresh green creeping plant to bear yet another bigger tuber. (Ernest Agyemang Yeboah)
Death and yams
At harvest of the early yams ( kuvi ) there is an offering of first fruits to the memory of the recently dead. (Bronislaw Malinowski)
Death was not at home by that time, he was in his yam garden. (Amos Tutuola)
The parents and friends of the dead had, indeed, faithfully fulfilled their duties. The amount of food testified their esteem for the virtues of the chief. There were provisions enough to last ten persons fifteen days, or rather the deceased for eternity. They consisted of ferns, sweet yams, and potatoes, which were introduced some time before by the Europeans. (Jules Verne)
Me and yams
I think, therefore I Yam. (Ratbert)
Rupert had recovered his composure. “‘I yam what I yam,'” he quoted. (Andre Norton)
“I am! I am! I yam!” declared Darcy with progressive petulance. “I’ve been torturing myself for nothing. It hasn’t made a bit of difference. Look at me!” (Samuel Hopkins Adams)
Potatoes and yams
Then you panic because you’ve never known the difference between a sweet potato and a yam and both are on the counter, and if you start making a yam pie you’ll never hear the end of it. (Ellen DeGeneres)
As an edible root the buck yam, especially when grown in a light soil, is equal to the potato, if not superior to it. It does not, however, keep for any length of time, and therefore could not be exported to Europe, unless the roots were sliced and dried. (P.L. Simmonds)
Gardening and yams
What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don’t know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore. (Toni Cade Bambara)
The cultivation of bananas and yams – of the latter of which, and of two other edible roots, we saw large quantities in the huts – costs him very little trouble – he occasionally keeps a few pigs, and when inclined, can always catch plenty of fish, and occasionally a turtle upon the reefs at low-water. (John MacGillivray)
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