Home / Books / We Need New Names

We Need New Names

Book by NoViolet Bulawayo · 9 quotes · African Literature, Zimbabwe, African Authors

Browse quotes from We Need New Names.

Book detail: We Need New Names is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.

Browse quotes from We Need New Names.

The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.

We Need New Names Quotes

“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.”

Sky Winter Weather Midwest Zimbabwe Immigrant Experience

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger may be pacified in foreign lands, their tears wiped away in strange lands, the wounds of their despair bandaged in faraway lands, their blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what. They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their hands and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.”

Literary Fiction Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“He doesn't tell Aunt Fostalina she looks good, like I've heard other people do; he tells her she looks like sunrise.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God.”

Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names

“It's not the lying itself that makes makes me feel bad but the fact that I'm here lying to my friends. I don't like not playing with them and I don't like lying to them because they are the most important thing to me and when I'm not with them I feel like I'm not even me.”

Literary Fiction Literary Zimbabwe African Authors African Literature

Book:We Need New Names

Source: We Need New Names