Bernardine Evaristo Quotes

God a-damn me the day I chose to enter this hellish so-called marriage instead of following my Morris-loving, sweet-loving, full-blooded, hot-blooded, pumping-rumping, throbbing organ of an uncontainable, unrestrainable, undetainable man-loving heart.

What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it'll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all

The Barbies with their stick legs and rocket breasts were another problem Megan had to endure. She was supposed to spend hours dressing up or playing house with them, including the darker ones she was supposed to find more relatable. In a fit she'd once tried to commit Barbicide, defaced them with colored marker pens, chopped off hair, extracted eyes with scissors and de-limbed a few... The Barbie invasion proliferated on birthdays and at Christmas, relatives talked about incredible collection, as if she'd actually chosen to have them in her life.

I was grateful to have him to support and steer me, even though he wasn't particularly good-looking or with a dashing personality, both attributes I'd imagined for a husband before I was mature enough to accept that it was easier to dream
Than it was to make the dream come true

as if she was the kind of woman who'd amputate her aspirations to become one of his decorative appendages

Life is about taking risks, not about burying your head in the sand

in that moment all the painful history of four hundred years of slavery entered my body in a way it hadn't before and I broke down and sobbed, Dominique, I sobbed and realized more than ever that the white man has a lot to answer for

be a person with knowledge not just opinions

I tell Mum she married a patriarch
Look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s
And your point is?
You really can't expect him to 'get you', as you put it
I let her know she's an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women
She says human beings are complex
I tell her not patronize me

Waris said it's crazy that people are so stupid to think over one and a half billion Muslims all think and act the same way, a Muslim man carries out a mass shooting or blows people up and he's called a terrorist, a white man does the same thing and he's called a mad man

both sets are mad, Yazz

Thereafter she saw his intellectual showmanship as a performance, deep down he could be as vulnerable as anyone

she runs for her life because to slip up is to begin descending the slippery slope to giving in to failure, to inertia, to feeling sorry for herself about that moment in her life which still creeps to the front of her memory when she least expects it

she will stride up to the client, shake his hand firmly (yet femininely), while looking him warmly (yet confidently) in the eye and smiling innocently, and delivering her name unto him with perfectly clipped Received Pronunciation, showing off her pretty (thank-god-they're-not-too-thick) lips coated in a discreet shade of pink, baring her perfect teeth as he adjusts to the collision between reality and expectation, and tries not to show it while she assumes control of the situation and conversation.

People have to share everything they do these days, from meals, to nights out, to selfies of themselves half naked in a mirror
The borders between public and private are dissolving

why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back?
white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race

Ageing is nothing to be ashamed of
Especially when the entire race is in it together
Although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older
Because it's such a privilege to not die prematurely

And the only culture she gets is the one she decimates with bleach.

Courtney replied that she herself is a big fan of the non sequitur which really only means that a conversation is free-flowing and intuitive, as opposed to following a predictable trajectory, so to speak

Better than those mobile phones the young ones check hundreds of times a day which makes them go mental
She's read about it in the paper
Besides, why replace her old phone when it's still in good working order, sits on the console by the front door, attached to a wire that's attached to a socket
Telephone conversations should be kept short and had standing
Far as she's concerned

We should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings
How's can we argue with that?

life is an adventure to be embraced with an open mind and loving heart

this is not about feeling something or about speaking words
this is about being
together.

gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization

(...) the so-called democratization of reviews means the lowering of standards, and that subject knowledge, history and critical context are at risk of being lost in favour of people who only know how to write in attention-seeking soundbites.

African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you're going to drive yourself mad and, I'm sorry to say, everyone else with you

She likes to walk barefoot inside the house, even in winter
It's one of the secretes of her long-lasting mobility, keeping her toes spread and feet grounded, same as all the other beasts of nature
Hooves, that's what she's got
hooves

Her friendship with Amma is based on historic loyalty and comfortable familiarity rather than shared interests and perspectives

They decided they needed to start their own theatre company to have careers as actors, because neither was prepared to betray their politics to find jobs
Or shut their mouths to keep them

I'm also wary of walking home late at night on my own, I miss being respectfully called sir when I'm in a shop or restaurant, and I'm definitely taken less seriously when I open my mouth
You see, Megan, I learnt first hand how women are discriminated against, which is why I became a feminist after I'd transitioned, an intersectional feminist, because it's not just about gender but race, sexuality, class and other intersections which we mostly unthinkingly live anyway

Hazel said novels was better value than poetry books because they had more words in them, poetry books was a rip-off
(Winsome doesn't think Hazel should be in their reading group)