It’s a novel, right? What’s it about?” Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Poder es la capacidad no solo de contar la historia de otra persona, sino de convertirla en la historia definitiva de dicha persona.
Books will help her understand and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in whatever she wants to become – a chef, a scientist, a singer, all benefit from the skills that reading brings.
He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go?
The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna’s wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away.
Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:.
All of us – women and men – must do better.
Now the verandah was so silent I could hear the sound of the raindrops sliding off the leaves.
My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?
He was eighty-eight” so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.
It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.
They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.
His humor, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged.
It is instinctive my recoiling. I imagine the confusion of some relatives, their disapproval even, when faced with my withdrawal; the calls I leave unanswered, the messages unread...
Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.
Later, when his ebullience became a temptation to Ifemelu, an unrelieved sunniness that made her want to strike at it, to crush it, this would be one of her best memories of Curt, as he was in the tarot shop on South Street on a day filled with the promise of summer: so handsome, so happy, a true believer.
Happiness becomes a weakness because it leaves you defenseless in the face of grief.
Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you want for yourself, and not what others want you to want. Please reject the idea that motherhood and work are mutually exclusive.
Tears were so cheap now.
The afternoon played across my mind as I got out of the car in front of the flat. I had smiled, run, laughed. My chest was filled with something like bath foam. Light. The lightness was so sweet I tasted it on my tongue, the sweetness of an overripe bright yellow cashew fruit.
You lower your voice when you speak. You talk in whispers.