Lucía’s Reviews > Americanah > Status Update

Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being.

many of us didn’t marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman thar was around when we were ready to marry.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

Perhaps he should have talked more with her, (...) because although they exchanged pleasant sounds and were good friends and shared comfortable silences, they did not really talk. But he had never tried, because he knew that the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.

“People do really become eccentric when they become rich.”
“Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it?”

A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, (...) the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Wordlers and Third Wordlers are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.

a wordless fear had seized her, a fear of breaking delicate things.

He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way.

Everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.

Priye had the sure, slightly sinister manner of someone who could get other people to do what she wanted.