Onyi Nwabineli > Quotes

“Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much so that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“There is nothing eloquent about my grief. It scares people. I slouch into a room and nobody knows how to react. I will take silent uneasiness over unsolicited advice any day, one more everything happens for a reason might push me over the line into homicidal.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Nobody tells you that irrational hope is a side effect of grief. And they should because it is dangerous.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you. You may not have even registered that you don't laugh anymore--another point on the itemized list of things grief steals from you.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“There lives within all humans an inherent arrogance. An oftentimes misplaced confidence and assuredness that we are in control of every occurrence in our lives.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Born in Benin, Nigeria, Onyi Nwabineli grew up in Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Newcastle and now lives in London. An English and creative writing graduate, Onyi works in technology and project management. She is cofounder of Surviving Out Loud, a fund that provides survivors of sexual assault with legal assistance, therapy and temporary relocation. Someday, Maybe is Onyi’s debut and she is currently at work on her second novel.”
― Onyi Nwabineli

“...there is no easy way to articulate what it means for your loved ones to worry that your person's ability to love you is limited by their inability to comprehend many of your lived experiences.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“when someone you love dies, there's this period of disbelief-a time of dug-in heels, the refusal to process your new reality.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“My mother loves Jesus. Therefore, she does not get stressed; she gets holy.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“If he had a backbone, all of us would be headache-free.” Nneoma could do nothing but incline her head in agreement.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“She had still not recognized, even at twenty-five, that she could be loved without having toiled for it; that acceptance was not solely a reward for good behavior.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“Grief makes you believe you are special, its one and only; like it is not careening around destroying millions of lives every day and is devoting all its unwanted attention on you.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“bottom”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“I don't want to be happy. There is no happy. I am content to wallow in this cesspit for all eternity because it is like poking at a mouth ulcer with the tip of your tongue--inadvisable, painful, but addictive. What I choose to say to my little brother instead: 'Someday. Maybe.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Why now?" Jackson asks, and to answer him would be to admit that the last stage of grief has stages of its own and I am cycling through various forms of acceptance, understanding you must allow the chips to fall where they may before rummaging through the debris and piecing together something that resembles a life.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“I am brought back to the inescapable fact that lives are lived outside of mine and people are not mere characters in my story but are stories all their own. My sphere is just that. And a small one, too, shockingly finite.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Praying for Ophelia’s downfall was no longer enough; Aṅụrị needed to participate in it. Month one: Aṅụrị, on a visit”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“To say he had not tried would be a gross misrepresentation of the extent Nkem had not tried. His abdication of responsibility should be studied in classrooms around the globe and titled Nkem-ism. That a father could be so present and at the same time so utterly absent in important matters would be awe-inspiring were it not so tragic.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“If there is one thing white people hate more than anything in this world, it is the implication that their racism makes them”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“The unique thirst for alcohol lived like an unruly tenant in her mind, refusing to be evicted.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“my capacity for loving Q had not reached fruition; there were still unmined depths to it I am never going to be able to explore,”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Habits die harder than we do, it seems”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“To liken the relationship between stepmother and child to that of a corporation and actor is the epitome of a false equivalence. My client is not a willful employee of Mrs. Chinasa. She did not enter into a voluntary agreement. There was no contract. What infant can reasonably consent to their image being used in varied commercial capacity for what amounts to the financial and social elevation of the guardian in perpetuity?”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“But I was wrong. It makes no sense that I feel closer to Q here than I do even in the bed we shared for years, but perhaps the simplicity of the memories here have something to do with it. Remembering can be tiresome work. Not all memories weigh the same.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“Someone too weak to resist the lure of alcohol-induced oblivion was perhaps not the same someone who ought to become guardian to an already delicate human.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“I work with influencers. I’ve seen what can happen when they’re backed into a corner.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself

“To grieve is to frighten the people you love.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“You'll be happy again. He wasn't the author of that. It'll just be different.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe

“To sacrifice a child on the faux altar of progressiveness was still a sacrifice. Safeguarding could not just be set aside in favor of the intoxicant that was attention.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Allow Me to Introduce Myself