Sage Abena Jade > Sage's Quotes

“Even listening in on their plans for me did not take the tomato seller off my mind. After searching for days, I traced her to the farmland on the edge of our village. When I saw her, courage failed me. My liver weakened and I could not bring myself to talk to her. I abandoned my fufu and stalked her, overjoyed to be breathing the air she was breathing. I saw every man she teased. A gasp escaped my lips every time she rolled her hips and jiggled the beads that adorned her waist. Sweat was dripping from my neck like rain from the awning. I can’t explain why but I wanted her for myself. I wanted to build a house for her and keep the key between my breasts. I wanted to dress her in the finest aso oke so she could parade herself for my delight alone. I wanted to lock her between my thighs.”
― Lola Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

“Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man's promises”
― Lola Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

“I want to see you again." He stopped, took her face in his hands. "I need to see you again."

Her pulse jumped, as if it had nothing to do with the rest of her. "Roarke, what's going on here?"

"Lieutenant." He leaned forward, touched his lips to hers. "indications are we're having a romance.”
― J.D. Robb, Naked in Death

“We all have the beast in us Bill, and it is up to us to control it.”
― Leslie W.P. Garland, The Little Dog

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”
― Albert Einstein

“This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
― George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“The longer you live, the more you learn. People are a mystery that can never be solved. Life has a way of sorting itself out. Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“I saw it a few years ago in a bookshop but didn’t buy it.’ ‘I hate it when that happens. Book regret. You come across something and think, I don’t want that, and later, you’re obsessed with getting it and it’s no longer available.”
― Balli Kaur Jaswal, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

“You can separate the idiots from the bloody idiots.”
― Balli Kaur Jaswal, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

“I always find it funny when people say that money makes people proud. If you check it, poor people are some of the proudest people in this world.”
― Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, I Do Not Come to You by Chance

“He often referred to the female gender in plural form, as if they did not exist except in batches.”
― Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, I Do Not Come to You by Chance

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“faith without doubt is addiction”
― Salman Rushdie

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God