Quotes from book

Half of a Yellow Sun

“Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”

“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.”

“The truth has become an insult.”

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

“Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”

“This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.”

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”

“There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.”

“And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.”

“Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?”

“A gorgeous pitless account of love, violence and betrayal.”