Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 433 pages
Rating: (65.1K votes)
“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.”
“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
“...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”
“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
“Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.”
“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”
“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”
“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”
“And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.”
“The truth has become an insult.”
“This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.”
“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”
“Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.”
“He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.”
“Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”
“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”
“Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?”
“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ”
“There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.”
“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
“Why do I love him?...I don't think love has a reason...I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.”
“Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”
“Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”
“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”
“I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn’t exist, so I didn’t leave.”
“If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise”
“If this is hatred, then it is very young. I has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.”
“هل الحبّ هو هذا الاحتياج المُضلل لأن تكونَ إلى جواري معظم الوقت؟ هل الحبّ هو هذا الأمان الذي أشعرُ به أنا في صمتنا؟”
“Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.
maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.”
“Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.”
“Oh, go away! You're in my eyes," said John in a loud voice.
"Sorry!" said the sunlight. "I must move from East to West in a day. Sorry! Shut your eyes and you won't see me.”
“I found my hope when I found you.”
“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them, that’s how they really are.”
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