Aminatta Forna Quotes

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.

How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.

People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water.

To whom do you go first?

Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...

Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase.

At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed.

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.

What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality?