“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. But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a master, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old! Oh, yes, in England, looking after babies was in itself a full-time job.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“The leaves were still on the trees, but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers?”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“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?”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
“She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from Second Class Citizen
Buchi Emecheta
Born place: in Lagos, Nigeria
Born date July 21, 1944
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“She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Mandarins
“memory is what the brain does, how it composes us and allows our past to help determine our future. In no small part memory makes us who we are”
― Bruce D. Perry, quote from The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
“Just promise me you’ll stop acting like a bastard,” Lock pleaded. “Having her hate us won’t help the process any.” Deep gave him a sardonic smile. “Don’t worry—I’ll be on my best behavior.”
― Evangeline Anderson, quote from Hunted
“Julius rose to his feet. The towel dropped, showering cut brown hair over Monna Alessandra's elegant tiles. His hair, finely tailored, clung to a thick-boned face with slanting eyes and a blunt profile which would have looked well on a coin. Tobie, who had almost no hair, gazed at him sadly.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from The Spring of the Ram
“The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.”
― Nancy Mitford, quote from The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate
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The Inconvenient Ind...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.
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