Buchi Emecheta Quotes

Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves.

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage….The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.

At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept.

Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me.

The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins.

So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy.

On each cheek was drawn the outline of a large spinach leaf looking ready to be picked. It was not that many Ibos would have put so many on the face of a little girl. But Ojebeta's mother Umeadi, when she realised that her daughter was going to live, had had reason for going to the expense of engaging the services of the most costly face-maker in Ibuza. For, with such a riot of tribal spinach marks on her only daughter's face, no kidnapper would dream of selling her into slavery. What was more, if she got lost her people would always know her.

My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor.

Relatives watching wanted and expected me to break down and cry, thereby devaluing my inner sorrow.

Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?

God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage? she prayed desperately.

He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of…But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him … He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things.

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World.

The leaves were still on the trees but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.

Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?