Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell.
She is one of those black people who want to be the only black person in the room, so any other black person is an immediate threat to her.
Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression “human rights” is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.
Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her.
He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ he said often.
Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally.
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We.
Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said.
He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more than the average salary plus stock options because they were desperately trying to look diverse.
They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said “blowhard.” She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her.
But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone.
And I said, Ah correct, there is hope. She reads.
Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy.
My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush.
He felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.
Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos.
The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative.
Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.
She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world.
She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again.