Namwali Serpell > Quotes

“During his time at university, Ronald had learned that 'history' was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“But really and truly the devil entered my life one day. You know, you look back on it. And you see that something stepped in. Right. There.”
― Namwali Serpell, Will Williams

“Every family is a war but some are more civil than others.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“She stepped from the trashy bedlam of the road into the cool cave of the shop, relieved to escape the experience of walking outside while female.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you'll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you'll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“The Civil Rights Movement in the US was all about logjams and blockades. Martin Luther King is the one who said “a riot is the language of the unheard”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Face all bittered up ’cause he had bad knees and we didn’t.”
― Namwali Serpell, Will Williams

“The world was tilted now and Wayne’s absence in our lives had become the drain toward which everything ran.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Only a sister, an alternative self, could inspire such a sordid mix of disgust and envy.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“No grass back there, just concrete with cracks so big, your mama’s back stayed broke.”
― Namwali Serpell, Will Williams

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“All afternoon, all evening, I lay on the couch, wrapped inside a quilt of sitcoms, the same commercials stitching them together.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“Stephen Hawking once said, ‘Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.’ Every small stray opens up a new way, an Eden of forking digressions.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Evolution forged the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake...”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

A mountain walks, stumbles, then sweeps straight toward us, its ravenous mouth wide open.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“I don’t matter, you don't matter, we're all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it. To record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“[She] felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Grief doesn’t choose its timing well; you’ll never know when it will grip your neck.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“I want to tell them that our minds are free, even if our hand are tied by poverty.”
― Namwali Serpell

“Gloom everywhere. Gloom up the Potomac; where it rolls among meadows no longer green, and by splendid country seats. Gloom down the Potomac where it washes the sides of huge war-ships. Gloom on the marshes, the fields, and the heights. Gloom settling steadily down over the sumptuous habitations of the rich, and creeping through the cellars of the poor. Gloom arresting the steps of chance-office seekers, and bewildering the heads of grave and reverend Senators; for with fog, and drizzle, and a sleety driving mist the night has come at least two hours before its time.”
― Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces

“Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“The midwives were still circling the mother’s shipwrecked body, tending to her, murmuring like the sea, the child’s cries like that same sea breaking. Giovanna swaddled the baby in elaborate folds and handed the burden to its bearer. The mother, whose name was Adriana, looked down at the hairy little face and promptly fainted. Giovanna grabbed the baby just before it tumbled off the bed. The midwives laughed. Such drama! The wool would fall out. The whelp had just forgotten to eat it in the womb.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“dwindle. Vultures! We started this nation with potential. “A society of the people!” Kaunda said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just for the top three per cent. The capitalists replaced the colonialists. And”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“…people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Fugitive (1925), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“The thoughts are like links in a chain, then the chains start pulling you by the wrists as you stagger along, picking up speed until you start to jog, race, careen and this is how turbulence becomes the bumpiness of a road that I’m rattling along in a giant vehicle, massive firs on either side casting occasional shadows within ( my dream making sense of people passing down the aisle), my mind skimming the surface of sleep like a wake in water, lightly enough that it churns up real events into surreal dreams.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“…Another way his death has skewed us all apart, the way a missing tooth grows gaps between the others.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows