Quotes from Aminatta Forna

My family's a ruling family.

So, where does it come from, the fury? A thousand indignities, a thousand wrongs, like tiny knife wounds, shredding a person's humanity. In time only the tattered remnants are left. And in the end they ask themselves — what good is this to me? And they throw the last of it away.

Something happened here. A change. Stealthy, creeping, slow. Like the way the desert is gradually covering the plain, one grain of sand at a time. It took place without us even noticing, so that the moment when we might have resisted passed unremarked.

There is nothing inevitable about the impact of trauma, except perhaps the way the victim is going to be treated by professionals like us, who will then ascribe every subsequent difficulty in their lives to what has happened to them in the past. We don't blame victims any longer, instead we condemn them. We treat them like damaged goods and in so doing we compound the pain of whatever wound has been inflicted and we encourage everyone around them to do the same.

There's nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.

The reckless open their arms & topple into love, as do dreamers who fly in their dreams without fear or danger. Those who know that all love must end in loss do not fall but rather cross slowly from the not knowing into the knowing.

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.

I sought solace in the very thing that caused me pain.

Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive.

I'm a scientist, I should never have used the word coincidence. There's less synchronicity and more causality than we often think. Things happen. Sometimes in ways we couldn't even start to imagine.

I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.

you ask a member of the voting public a question on any subject most of us can only come up with three words we identify with that thing. The words depend on what our concerns are or what the papers tell us our concerns are

We are so used to the elephant in the room that sometimes we forget it is there

But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations?

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.

For a long time, as I waited for her to return, I believed she knew I was there behind the trees and that this was my doing. That she knew I would come. For who else could it have been?

There are after all, and as Laura said, so many summers.

Vinka Pavi? is an angry woman and her anger shows in the set of her teeth, the lines around her mouth into which her lipstick bleeds, the way she folds her arms. When she laughs it is to mock and in this she finds an ally in her son. But Anka, Anka was born with joy in her soul, to which they feel she has no right. Behind it all, as with so many things in life and in death, lies envy. In the end it gets the better of them.

They were all on government scholarships - men and women chosen to lead the countries one day soon across the post-independence horizon towards a new Africa where they would design bridges, run schools, plan towns, drain swamps, build hospitals or, as likely become deskbound bureaucrats.

It was the way people thought: what you couldn't do anything about you learned to accept.

Yes Sierra Leone to me was both utterly familiar and ineffably alien: I knew it but I could not claim to understand it.

And what is life without incident? Is such a life even possible?' He took a sip of his water: 'How do we become human except in the face of adversity?

On the other side of the river the lights of the South Bank theatre and concert halls were up. The actors would be preparing to perform emotions for those who had never felt those kinds of emotions in their lives and perhaps never would. Suffering had become a spectacle that served not to warn of the vagaries of misfortune but to remind the audience, sitting in warmth and comfort, of their own good fortune.

The glass dwellers were terrified of the cloche being lifted. They treated the suffering of others as something exceptional, something that required treatment, when what was exceptional was all this.