Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

Author

Lailah Gifty Akita

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Lailah Gifty Akita. more

You May Also Like

“These rocks are the church where I knelt in black worsted silk beside my mother. Her shoulders sharp beneath my embrace. My mother: a solid wailing. These rocks are the soil where she kneels before the whorls of roses, kneeing before that box as if it were my father's grave. The closed anemones offer their sticky blossoms as the tide washes toward me. Small bits of the coast meet my skin, scraping my iron onto my knees.”

ParentsBeachMarine Life
Book:Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire
Create image

“There's a saying: those who do not swim deep in the waters from which they came cannot arrive in the oceans they hope to go. My parents began an ocean away and arrived in a land of lakes and snow. I've been back to their waters (is it mine, too?) but, wasn't a good swimmer. Everyone spoke underwater; I could only hold my breath to listen for so long. I did learn the water carries its own song.”

OceanImmigrationParentsSwimWaters
Book:Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire
Create image

“I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them - that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I'd like to say they did the best they could, but that couldn't have been their best. I wasn't doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn't even occur to them.”

ParentsDoing The Best You Can
Book:Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and you too!
Create image

“My relationship with my father had always been about my version of things; I never contemplated what might have happened in his life to make him act the way he did. I never considered his story. I was a child, yes, but then I was an adult. It's hard for me to have sympathy for my father because a lot of his behavior I find inexcusable, but it's important for me to look at his story as independent from my own, and try to have a little empathy. I had never thought about being his child. I thought about him being my father, but never the other way around. Empathy. We both had none...I don't know if it was the best he could do, but I also don't know that it wasn't...I told him that I now understood my father's limitations along with my own. I thought our relationship was about me showing him how great I was, when truly he was most likely trying to prove to me how great he was. He was wondrously obsessed with himself, as I was with his affection for me. Today I'm able to say with confidence that I do love my father. I don't know how much I like his behavior, but in the end, isn't love more valuable than like?”

Parents
Book:Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and you too!
Create image

“And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero’s search for a father. It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be embarrassing. It’s simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father.”

WritingRelationshipsFamilyParentsMothersFathers
Book:Breakfast Of Champions
Create image

“I realize now, the life 
of an étranger is much like being the only child of older parents who hold tons of cocktail parties. You’re embarrassed for being there and it’s obvious you stand out. You’re treated (often) like a child. You don’t know the formal codes and you’re learning on the fly. Since you assume people are feigning interest in you, you pick up tics and quick-witted dodges to make yourself more endearing or to better hide your deficiencies. And in the end, you go to your room exhausted, not really sure if you had a good time, not really sure why you were there in the first place, but content nonetheless.”

ParentsCocktailsLearning Language
Book:Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French
Create image

“And soon a cold realization hit me: The time for giving up hope and 
letting go was now. It would be my parting gift to her. And as I cried 
into Mom’s ear and held her hand, and told her it was okay to let go, that I’d be fine, I felt her chest rise one last time. There was no long 
continuous beep like you see in the movies. Just a deafening silence 
and my echo of good-bye skipping down the side of her ear like a coin 
down a deep well.”

DeathParentsMourningSaying Goodbye
Book:Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French
Create image