Buchi Emecheta Quotes

I am a woman and a woman of Africa. I am a daughter of Nigeria and if she is in shame, I shall stayand mourn with her in shame.

I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.

But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We women subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.

Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience.

Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?

At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept. But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a master, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old! Oh, yes, in England, looking after babies was in itself a full-time job.

I like to be called a Nigerian rather than somebody from the Third World or the developing or whatever.

A hungry man is an angry one.

God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage? she prayed desperately.

I came to England in 1962 as a very young bride, in my teens, hoping just to stay two years and go back.

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person ... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.

Nnu Ego was like those not-so well-informed Christians who,promised the Kingdom of Heaven,believed that it was literally just round the corner and that Jesus Christ was coming on the very morrow. Many of them would hardly contribute anything ton this world,reasoning, "What is the use? Christ will come soon" They became so insulated in their beliefs that not only would they have little to do with ordinary sinners,people going about their daily work, they even pitied them and in many cases looked down on them because the Kingdom of God was not for the likes of them. Maybe this was a protective mechanism devised to save them from realities too painful to accept.

She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.

I work toward the liberation of women, but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman.

She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements.

The leaves were still on the trees, but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.

Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

Don't blame anyone for what has happened to your father. Things have changed drastically since the days of his own youth,but he has refused to see the changes...The fact is that parents get only reflected glory from their children nowadays,whereas your father has invested in all of you, just as his father invested in him so that he could help on the farm. Your father forgot that he himself left the family farm to come to this place.