Aminatta Forna > Quotes

“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”
― Aminatta Forna

“All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.”
― Aminatta Forna, Ancestor Stones

“The reckless open their arms and topple into love, as do dreamers, who fly in their dreams without fear or danger. Those who know that all love must end in loss do not fall but rather cross slowly from the not knowing into the knowing.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing.”
― Aminatta Forna

“A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.”
― Aminatta Forna, Ancestor Stones

“At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back”
― Aminatta Forna

“Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player. To whom do you go first? This is the ‘tell’ of love. When a thing happens, be it good or bad, when you pick up the telephone or push through a crowd, who is it you most want to reach?”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.”
― Aminatta Forna

“He seemed to remember a sense of fearlessness as a child, for lacking the knowledge of death, he supposed, for still believing bad things happened only to other people. How long you held on to that particular belief depended on where you were born.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.”
― Aminatta Forna

“What if, by labelling our patients damaged from the outset, we not only condemn them to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but have overlooked a potential finding of equal importance? That the emotional vulnerability of trauma is oftentimes transformed into emotional strength. What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality? Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger, yes. What if I told you that there are times when whatever does not kill me can make me more, not less, than the person I was before?”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“She liked him, had liked him, but now all she felt was the faint but real distaste a woman feels for the lover she no longer desires.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“There is nothing inevitable about the impact of trauma, except perhaps the way the victim is going to be treated by professionals like us, who will then ascribe every subsequent difficulty in their lives to what has happened to them in the past. We don’t blame victims any longer, instead we condemn them. We treat them like damaged goods and in so doing we compound the pain of whatever wound has been inflicted and we encourage everyone around them to do the same.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“The glass dwellers were terrified of the cloche being lifted. They treated the suffering of others as something exceptional, something that required treatment, when what was exceptional was all this.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man

“you ask a member of the voting public a question on any subject most of us can only come up with three words we identify with that thing. The words depend on what our concerns are or what the papers tell us our concerns are,”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either.”
― Aminatta Forna