Irene > Irene's Quotes

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
― bell hooks

“If it is very painful for you to criticize your friends, you are safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that is the time to hold your tongue”
― Alice Miller

“I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.”
― Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child

“Women been gittin' pregnant ever since Eve ate that apple.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Graduation, the hush-hush magic time of frills and gifts and congratulations and diplomas, was finished for me before my name was called. The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. Donleavy had exposed us.

We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.”
― chimamanda ngozi adichie, Americanah

“If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“He had first been excited by Facebook, ghosts of old friends suddenly morphing to life with wives and husbands and children, and photos trailed by comments. But he began to be appalled by the air of unreality, the careful manipulation of images to create a parallel life, pictures that people had taken with Facebook in mind, placing in the background the things of which they were proud.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called 'participation,' and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“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 child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life," Curt said with a force that startled her.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“If you come as softly
As wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.

If you come as lightly
As threading dew
I will take you gladly
Nor ask more of you.

You may sit beside me
Silent as a breath
Only those who stay dead
Shall remember death.

And if you come I will be silent
Nor speak harsh words to you.
I will not ask you why, now.
Or how, or what you do.

We shall sit here, softly
Beneath two different years
And the rich earth between us
Shall drink our tears.”
― Audre Lorde

“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”
― Audre Lorde

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
― Audre Lorde