Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Aminatta Forna

Quote by Aminatta Forna

Author

Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna is a British author of Sierra Leonean origin, renowned for her fiction and non-fiction works that explore themes of identity, memory, and the African diaspora. Born in 1964, she has penned several novels and essays that reflect her own experiences as a woman of African descent living in the UK. more

You May Also Like

“From both my families, I've learnt important things. From my family of chance, I learnt what it was like to be alone and unrecognized, to be perceived through the prism of delusion, a lost soul marooned in the belly of bedlam. I learned the beauty and power of language, but also its capacity for subtle perfidy, how it can be used to subvert and distort reality, to sanction cruelty and sugarcoat abuse. I learned that words can be the path to freedom or just another lock on the caged door. And from my family of choice, I learn on a daily basis about love and loyalty, about burdens shared and intimacies treasured, about forgiveness and atonement and joy. I learn about the gift of a difficult childhood and the fact that ''it's never too late to have a happy one.”

“People ask me where I got my x-ray powers. I inherited them from my parents in parental supervision. Erase the dots and your doubts if you think that I was 'raysed' alone.”

“همه گمان میکنند بچه خوشبخت است. نه خوب یادم است آن وقت بیشتر حساس بودم. آن وقت هم مقلد و آب زیرکاه بودم. شاید ظاهرا میخندیدم یا بازی میکردم. ولی در باطن کمترین زخم زبان یا کوچکترین پیشامد ناگوار و بیهوده ساعتهای دراز فکر مرا به خود مشغول میداشت و خودم خودم را میخوردم”

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?”