Quotes from Aminatta Forna

He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.

Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player. To whom do you go first? This is the 'tell' of love. When a thing happens, be it good or bad, when you pick up the telephone or push through a crowd, who is it you most want to reach?

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.

At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back

People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.

We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.

How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.

He seemed to remember a sense of fearlessness as a child, for lacking the knowledge of death, he supposed, for still believing bad things happened only to other people. How long you held on to that particular belief depended on where you were born.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

I'd always kept an eye on the house. I don't mean doing repairs, for as the house didn't belong to me that was not my place, but rather I'd keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow's feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.

Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.

Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...

Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), Lack of breath.

He selected some music and thought that he would dance, but he failed. Instead he turned up the music until it smothered the sound of the dead woman weeping in his heart.

They were all signs and there would be more, surfacing one by one, floating in front of me like flotsam from a shipwreck. Even when I was drowning I dismissed them all, first with foolishness, then with pride, and finally because I had put out my own eyes with hot pokers of shame.

Hitler, Pol Pot. Funny, isn't it? How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world? I wonder why that is.' And Kai had responded, 'Because they're mad.' She had dug a sharp elbow into his ribs. Then she shook her head. 'But they do, don't they? They do change the world.

I knew when not to speak, when not to let myself be heard. Silence was my friend, my twin, the other half of me. Silence was my weapon. Not a blustering gun, but an invisible spider's web.

I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.