48 Quotes by Petina Gappah

[L]ife is one big jest at the expense of humanity. - ‘The Mupondawana Dancing Champion

Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smell of each other’s armpits. - ‘The Mupondawana Dancing Champion

This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.

Each heartbreak is a little death, all the same.

There is only one illness that pushes both the well-wheeled and the un-wheeled to seek out the prophet. It is the big disease with the little name, the sickness that no one dies of, the disease whose real name is unspoken, the sickness that speaks its presence through the pink redness of lips, the slipperiness of hair, through the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended.

A voice reminds us that the land is ours, it will not be taken from us again; the country will never be a colony again. - ‘Something Nice from London

Later, as she drove the children to school, she thought how worn the grooves were along which they moved their quarrels. She could feel herself saying all the clichéd phrases of a thousand injured women before her, but she could never stop herself. - ‘The Negotiated Settlement

She looked around for something with which to cut the cord. There was nothing, and the baby almost slipped from her hands. Through a film of tears she chewed on Martha’s flesh, closing her mind to the taste of blood, she chewed and tugged on the cord until the baby was free. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The baby cried, she held it to her chest, and felt an answering rise in her chest. – ‘An Elegy for Easterly

Wafa Wanaka, our elders say. Not only does this mean that death is the ultimate peace, it also means that we are not to speak ill of the dead. Once a person has crossed over to the real of the spirits, he takes his transgressions with him, and we speak only of the good. - 'Something Nice from London