Famous Quotes & Sayings

Aminatta Forna Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 51 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Aminatta Forna.

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Famous Quotes By Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1789274

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1012512

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 284265

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 542270

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1509392

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 915944

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 876607

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 2026517

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 508573

We are so used to the elephant in the room that sometimes we forget it is there — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1765449

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1134438

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 2038402

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1599958

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1760878

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 212943

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1743410

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 696725

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 439065

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 2242072

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child? — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1511982

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 417492

How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1661740

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 335899

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 276399

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 275409

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1801170

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1872340

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1955291

[T]hose most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1962334

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 236204

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 94535

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 2073709

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 2153189

Adrian hears the echo of his own thoughts of earlier in the day, only differently stated. The silent lie. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 660179

My family's a ruling family. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 607687

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 710207

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 775142

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 808500

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 820622

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 830225

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 834928

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 612745

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 894807

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1374246

I temporarily became a surgeon for 'Memory of Love'. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it. — Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna Quotes 587728

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1039277

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 517665

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1207180

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1241849

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1308921

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

Aminatta Forna Quotes 1314115

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