163 quotes
"This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles"
Half of a yellow sun (2006)
What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.
Zikora (2020)
It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be.
Zikora (2020)
sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason.
Zikora (2020)
The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy
Zikora (2020)
In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it its false glow
I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold
Zikora (2020)
It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewande. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.
Purple Hibiscus (2003)
Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being
Zikora (2020)
"A successful story for me exist in a moral universe, not one where goodness always triumph, because that would be false but one with an inherent awareness of goodness"
The Best Short Stories (2021)
I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.
Zikora (2020)
If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.
Zikora (2020)
The men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities, women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet. Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women.
I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?
Zikora (2020)
When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.
Zikora (2020)
If a man is getting ready for a business meeting he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman is getting ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine, and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously.
Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing
Zikora (2020)
This is the kind of capitalism I hate. This is bullying capitalism. Look, I am Igbo, I come from a trading culture. My people are merchant and I'm all for buying and selling. But capitalism has to be a fair exchange.
censorship very often does not achieve its objective. My first instinct, on learning that a book has been banned, is to seek it out and read it
When she made a U-turn and went back the way we had come, I let my mind drift, imagining God laying out the hills of Nsukka with his wide white hands, crescent-moon shadows underneath his nails just like Father Benedict’s.
Purple Hibiscus (2003)