Quotes from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“...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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Why do I love him?...I don't think love has a reason...I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn’t exist, so I didn’t leave.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“هل الحبّ هو هذا الاحتياج المُضلل لأن تكونَ إلى جواري معظم الوقت؟ هل الحبّ هو هذا الأمان الذي أشعرُ به أنا في صمتنا؟”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

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Popular quotes

“De lo que hemos dicho se desprende que la tarea del poeta es describir no lo que ha
acontecido, sino lo que podría haber ocurrido, esto es, tanto lo que es posible como
probable o necesario. La distinción entre el historiador y el poeta no consiste en que
uno escriba en prosa y el otro en verso; se podrá trasladar al verso la obra de Herodoto, y
ella seguiría siendo una clase de historia. La diferencia reside en que uno relata lo que ha
sucedido, y el otro lo que podría haber acontecido. De aquí que la poesía sea más
filosófica y de mayor dignidad que la historia.”
― Aristotle, quote from Poetics

“The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.”
― Plotinus, quote from The Enneads

“If there is no scent of Christ’s love on someone, then they bear no evidence of true devotion to Christ.”
― Eric Ludy, quote from When God Writes Your Love Story

“A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment

“The Dying Man"

in memoriam W.B. Yeats

1. His words

I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.

“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.

“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.

2. What Now?

Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.

Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.

I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.

In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.

3. The Wall

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.

Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.

The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.

4. The Exulting

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.

Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.

Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.

All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.

5. They Sing, They Sing

All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.

Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.

I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.

The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.