The Book of Memory Quotes

“I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

“When we talk of fate, when we talk of a fatalistic vision of human experience, what we mean is that the most important forces that shape human lives are out of human control.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

“This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

“There is no happy medium to our food; it is either overcooked or undercooked, or it has too much salt or not enough, or there is not enough oil in the fried vegetables or there is so much that you almost fear that America will invade.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory