Aminatta Forna Quotes

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and a former Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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.

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

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

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