Home › Authors › Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna Quotes
born 2006
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018).
Random Aminatta Forna quote
24 quotes
How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world?
“When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing.”
“What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.”
“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”
“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”
What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality?
"Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player."
“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.”
“All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.”
“There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.”
“I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.”
“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.”
"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."
“Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.”
“Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
What if, by labelling our patients damaged from the outset, we not only condemn them to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but have overlooked a potential finding of equal importance?
Topics Aminatta Forna is quoted on