Aminatta Forna Quotes

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy. ~ Aminatta Forna

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research. ~ Aminatta Forna

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

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

Unlike those earlier occasions - mourning a lost affection of his youth - this time there is to be no imagining her altered features, her new occupations, no unknown rival or replacement upon whom to project a wild jealousy. For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one - which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. So he sits and watches the sea and thinks of Mamakay. ~ Aminatta Forna

I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing. ~ Aminatta Forna

I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all. ~ Aminatta Forna

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

On the TV a politician Attila recognised was speaking. He was a heavyweight man wearing a suit that looked like a huge black bag. His hair was parted low on one side from where the mass of it surged forward lika an ocean braker onto the beach of his forehead where it was cast backwards onto the crown of his head, finally spilling over the back of his collar. That he was vexed was evidenced by the way he held up his hand, thumb and forefinger formed into the shape of an O which almost exactly mirrored the shape of his mouth; his face seemed to pulsate with fury. (...) Attila strained to listen. He had seen the politician on television before, had been compelled by his speech patterns, marked by half-sentences, the man left one thought unfinished as he rushed on to the next, he talked about himself in the third person. He raged, he shouted. All that, plus the laquered hair. Many politicians were narcissists, it came with the territory, the self-belief required. Narcissists weren't so bad, most great artists were narcissists too. This man though, in Attila's professional opinion, displayed many of the traits of hypomania. ~ Aminatta Forna

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

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas. ~ Aminatta Forna

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either. ~ Aminatta Forna

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life. ~ Aminatta Forna

I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted. ~ Aminatta Forna

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative. ~ Aminatta Forna

If you want to know a country, read its writers. ~ Aminatta Forna

At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back ~ Aminatta Forna

There's nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels. ~ Aminatta Forna

But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations? ~ Aminatta Forna

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create. ~ Aminatta Forna

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read. ~ Aminatta Forna

When he is away from her, he tries to conjure up her face. He closes his eyes, but the magic eludes him. When they are together he watches, learning her features, her gestures. Still, afterwards, he cannot make it happen. It is as though when she does she takes everything of herself with her. ~ Aminatta Forna

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission. ~ Aminatta Forna

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that. ~ Aminatta Forna

People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school. ~ Aminatta Forna

The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk. ~ Aminatta Forna

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man. ~ Aminatta Forna

We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned. ~ Aminatta Forna

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state. ~ Aminatta Forna

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

When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing. ~ Aminatta Forna

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

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody. ~ Aminatta Forna

Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive. ~ Aminatta Forna

One afternoon I lay on my bed, inert with mental fatigue, enumerating my many frustrations with the country & with the task I had set myself. It had taken me months of work to get this far, & every step of the way I felt I was pushing against some mighty, unspoken resistance. Time & time again I had felt that hardly a fact or a single item of information had been volunteered; every day I made half a dozen telephone calls; I trekked out to interview anyone who would talk to me, then found myself returning to the same place to ask for more information--questions I had omitted to ask, chase details they did not think, or perhaps wish, to supply. This was as true of people who had no reason to dissemble as of those who did. ~ Aminatta Forna

Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase. ~ Aminatta Forna

I don't have very many little fetishes, but the one I do have is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It's just a small china cup, and I get very upset if my husband moves it. ~ Aminatta Forna

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other. ~ Aminatta Forna

I'd always kept an eye on the house. I don't mean doing repairs, for as the house didn't belong to me that was not my place, but rather I'd keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow's feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged. ~ Aminatta Forna

Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), Lack of breath. ~ Aminatta Forna

He selected some music and thought that he would dance, but he failed. Instead he turned up the music until it smothered the sound of the dead woman weeping in his heart. ~ Aminatta Forna

The reckless open their arms and topple into love, as do dreamers, who fly in their dreams without fear or danger. Those who know that all love must end in loss do not fall but rather cross slowly from the not knowing into the knowing. ~ Aminatta Forna

How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her. ~ Aminatta Forna