Aminatta Forna Quotes

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.

I knew when not to speak, when not to let myself be heard. Silence was my friend, my twin, the other half of me. Silence was my weapon. Not a blustering gun, but an invisible spider's web.

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.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

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.

I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline.

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.

What if, by labelling our patients damaged from the outset, we not only condemn them to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but have overlooked a potential finding of equal importance?

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

The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.

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

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.

She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back.

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.

The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.