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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“[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

“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

“Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

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

“The sky is weeping too”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“She woke up to her sister sitting across from her.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

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

“She felt comfortable here, among the poor. She understood the constant complaining that surrounded them like the droning of insects. They were right: it was all just luck, just circumstance.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

“I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. —Edgar Allan Poe”
― Namwali Serpell, Will Williams

“I knew how utterly abominable I was as a teenager—that was half my excruciation. I sat back in my chair, disliking him, my throat choked with wanting him not to dislike me, with wanting him to believe me.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows