Chinelo Okparanta Quotes

… if we don't care enough about our own country to take care of it, then why should we expect anyone else to care?"

"The rest of the world still has a moral obligation to care…"

"All right, so the UK and the US should tell us again how to run our own country? Bring back colonialism?

There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.

I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world.

Let peace be. Let life be.

Sometimes we get confused about what happiness really means. Sometimes we get confused about what path to take to get to happiness.

Also, what if Adam and Ever were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside yourself? What if that's all it was? And why not?

If theirs was a goal of arriving at versions of themselves that they deemed better - perhaps more valuable - than their current selves, then who could blame them? And yet, they were in fact to be blamed.

She smiled just a little, as if to hide how powerful the words made her feel, but Chinasa saw it all the same: the way her face seemed to say that she had gotten the vengeance she sought. The kind of vengeance that turned love into a weapon. Tit for tat. You do me, I do you.

You'll marry your studies? Marry your books? You already have one degree but you want another. You'll marry your degrees?

This, it seems to me, is the lesson of the Bible: this affirmation of the importance of reflection, and of revision, enough revision to do away with the tired, old, even faulty laws.

If you set off on a witch-hunt, you will find a witch.
When you find her, she will be dressed like any other person. But to you, her skin will glow in stripes of white and black. You will see her broom, and you will hear her witch-cry, and you will feel the effects of her spells on you.
No matter how unlike a witch she is, there she will be, a witch, before your eyes.

I had become a little like a coffin: I felt a hollowness in me and a rattling at my seams.

...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.

Man and wife, the Bible said. It was a nice thought, but only in the limited way that theoretical things often are.

Shame is the power we give others to wield over us.

I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don't. It is my tears that allow me to glide.

Wasn't it the belief, after all, that women looked more beautiful during ovulation - or more gorgeous, if you would? At least there was an upside.