maryam’s Reviews > Americanah > Status Update

“ How could principal, an abstract thing floating in the air, wedge itself so solidly between them, and turned Blaine into somebody else? She wished it were an uncivil emotion, a passion like jealousy or betrayal.”

“ She had told Blaine about it later, and there was an impatience in her tone, almost an accusation, as she added, that academics were not intellectual; they were not curious, they built their solid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

“ he was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.”

“‘Removed.’ That word made obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing.“

The wind blowing across the British aisles was odorous w/fear of asylum-seekers, infecting evrybdy w/the panic of impending doom, & so articles were written & read, simply & stridently, as tho the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, &they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black &brown people from countries created by Britain

“His was the coiled, urgent restlessness of a person who believed that fate had mistakenly allotted him a place below his true destiny.”

“ it puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in childcare?”

“ she was a woman who kept to herself and asked no favors, who would not lie, who would not accept even a Christmas card from her students because it might compromise her, who accounted for every single kobo spent on any committee she was on, and here she was, behaving as the truth telling had become a luxury that they could no longer afford.“

“ There was something in him, lighter than ego, but darker than insecurity, that needed constant, buffing, polishing, waxing.”

“ he was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up, not doing but being.”