More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
“Maybe it is a European notion,” Miss Adebayo said, “but in the bigger picture, we are all one race.” “What bigger picture?” Master asked. “The bigger picture of the white man! Can’t you see that we are not all alike except to white eyes?”
She was used to her mother’s disapproval; it had colored most of her major decisions, after all:
Perhaps it was because he did not have that familiar superiority of English people who thought they understood Africans better than Africans understood themselves
“But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say,” Okeoma said. “My father’s brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?”
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
She sat up and realized that distrust would always lie between them, that disbelief would always be an option for them.
How much did one know of the true feelings of those who did not have a voice?
Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.
Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there.
There’s something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You’ve never even accepted that the man is ugly,”
“You have always felt sorry for people who don’t need you to feel sorry for them.”
Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.
