Quotes from book

Americanah

“She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.”

“… there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.”

“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”

“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.”

“Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.”

“Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.”

“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”

“How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted?”

“In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you.”

“I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.”

“And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.”

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”

“To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.”

“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”

“They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”

“They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.”

“Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”