36 Quotes by Buchi Emecheta

The leaves were still on the trees, but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World.

A man is never ugly”.

Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers’s laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other’s feelings, each other’s dignity.

At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept. But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a master, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old! Oh, yes, in England, looking after babies was in itself a full-time job.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that’s where I recoup my money.

Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for one another. I cannot live up to your standards, senior wife. So I have to set my own.

Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence and money is always short, bit with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head and those of my family, through God’s grace, above water.

Relatives watching wanted and expected me to break down and cry, thereby devaluing my inner sorrow. Maybe if I had not stayed in cold England for eighteen years – England, a country where people cry in their hearts and not with their eyes – I would have done so. Eighteen years is a long time, and like the people I live with, I cried in my heart.