The Memory of Love Quotes

“All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Hitler, Pol Pot. Funny, isn’t it? How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world? I wonder why that is.’ And Kai had responded, ‘Because they’re mad.’ She had dug a sharp elbow into his ribs. Then she shook her head. ‘But they do, don’t they? They do change the world.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“I sought solace in the very thing that caused me pain.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Saffia’s withdrawal from me took the form of unerring good manners. I alone noticed the way her eyes never sought mine, as they had before, unselfconsciously. And should our eyes meet by chance, her smile never broadened as it used to, but remained fixed in depth and width, quickly supplanted by and offer of more beer, an enquirer as to whether I was being bothered by the mosquitos, a suggestion to visit this place or that place, or meet this person or that person. She asked after Vanessa frequently. It is a way women have, or perhaps learn, of repositioning a man at arm’s length.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Once, standing in an open space, he’d seen a commercial airliner pass overhead, on its way from one country to another, the sun golden upon its wings. It seemed incredible to him that there were people inside, drinking wine and eating from plastic trays, pressing a button for the hostess. Did they have any idea what was going on directly below them, a nation devouring itself? He felt like a drowning man watching a ship sail by.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“This is our country. He was rejecting Adrian’s offer of help. It was this that had stung so much, the idea he was neither wanted nor needed. It had simply never occurred to him.
Attila. The man is right, of course. People here don’t need therapy so much as hope. But the hope has to be real- Attila’s warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“Julius and Raffia were like the sun and the moon. Everything revolved around Julius, or he behaved as though it did, you were drawn into his orbit. But Saffia was the moon, emanating her own clear, magnetic energy. The one to whom all our stories were told.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

“The gov’t stole from their own people for decades. They’re still at it. Did people say anything? Did they protest? No. Their children dressed in rags and went hungry. Nobody stood up to those men. And yet a poor man would be lynched for stealing tomatoes.’
‘So it goes,’ says Mary.
‘I’m afraid it does,’ says Adrian. Displaced anger, one of the most brutal paradoxes of exploited people. The tomato theif paid the price for the Minister’s Swiss bank accounts.”
― Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love