Best 20 quotes of Aminatta Forna on MyQuotes

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

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

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...

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

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

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.

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.

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

How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

My name is Attila.’ ah-til-ha. ‘That’s an unusual name,’ Jean said. ‘to whom?’ replied Attila cheerfully. ‘Well . . . everyone,’ said Jean. ‘not to the Hungarians or the Turks,’ said Attila. ‘your parents named you after Attila the Hun?’ Attila smiled. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘name their baby girls Victoria.

She liked him, had liked him, but now all she felt was the faint but real distaste a woman feels for the lover she no longer desires.

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.

There was, she thought, a moment between men and women in which a woman can no longer meet a certain man’s gaze. men held the power of the gaze, the freedom to look upon women as they pleased. In public a woman looked freely only upon men with whom there was no possibility of sex or the mistaken presumption of desire, in other words the very (very) old and the very young. In company women looked at men who might be colleagues or neighbours or married to women they knew, but even then their gaze was guarded. The moment friendship transformed into something else the woman looked away.

[T]hose most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?