51 Quotes by Aminatta Forna

I’m a scientist, I should never have used the word coincidence. There’s less synchronicity and more causality than we often think. Things happen. Sometimes in ways we couldn’t even start to imagine.

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.

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.

Jean wondered how it might be to go out into the night and howl for sex. The clarity of purpose was appealing. No games.

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.

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either.

Minutes past midnight the group left Pardis to be mugged by the wind, which came at them down the street like a gang of thieves.

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