Aminatta Forna Quotes

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

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

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

He seemed to remember a sense of fearlessness as a child, for lacking the knowledge of death, he supposed, for still believing bad things happened only to other people. How long you held on to that particular belief depended on where you were born.

How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world?

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

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.

To whom do you go first?

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.

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

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.

Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.