13 quotes
I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels.
Nervous Conditions (1988)
You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions.
Nervous Conditions (1988)
The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time.
People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear
This Mournable Body (2018)
Keening. I remember keening that seemed to go on all through the night: shrill, sharp, shiny, needless of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out.
Nervous Conditions (1988)
Stars below instead of above! I wanted to see them straight away. I prayed for a miracle, for the sun to set.
Nervous Conditions (1988)
“How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?”
This Mournable Body (2018)
“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That's what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting.
This Mournable Body (2018)
Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The one does not acknowledge the other's existence.
This Mournable Body (2018)
Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.
“You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.”
This Mournable Body (2018)
What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind.
Nervous Conditions (1988)
“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.”
This Mournable Body (2018)