Buchi Emecheta Quotes & Sayings

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. — Buchi Emecheta

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money. — Buchi Emecheta

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

Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience. — Buchi Emecheta

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

A hungry man is an angry one. — Buchi Emecheta

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger. — Buchi Emecheta

In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name. She worries over them,looks after them when they are small;but in the actual help on the farm ,the upholding of the family name,all belong to the father. — Buchi Emecheta

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? — Buchi Emecheta

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World. — Buchi Emecheta

The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it. — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta

A man is never ugly". — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta

She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost. — Buchi Emecheta

One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers? — Buchi Emecheta

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

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

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. — Buchi Emecheta

In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today. — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta

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

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

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. — Buchi Emecheta

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. — Buchi Emecheta