Top 43 Aminatta Forna Quotes
#1. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#2. My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.
Aminatta Forna
#3. There's nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.
Aminatta Forna
#4. All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.
Aminatta Forna
#5. A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.
Aminatta Forna
#6. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#7. The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.
Aminatta Forna
#8. When he is away from her, he tries to conjure up her face. He closes his eyes, but the magic eludes him. When they are together he watches, learning her features, her gestures. Still, afterwards, he cannot make it happen. It is as though when she does she takes everything of herself with her.
Aminatta Forna
#9. A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.
Aminatta Forna
#10. [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.
Aminatta Forna
#11. Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.
Aminatta Forna
#12. We are so used to the elephant in the room that sometimes we forget it is there
Aminatta Forna
#14. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#15. Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.
Aminatta Forna
#16. I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all.
Aminatta Forna
#17. Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
Aminatta Forna
#18. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#20. Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), Lack of breath.
Aminatta Forna
#21. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#22. I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.
Aminatta Forna
#23. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#24. Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
Aminatta Forna
#25. I don't have very many little fetishes, but the one I do have is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It's just a small china cup, and I get very upset if my husband moves it.
Aminatta Forna
#26. What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
#27. I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.
Aminatta Forna
#28. I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.
Aminatta Forna
#29. There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.
Aminatta Forna
#30. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#31. I temporarily became a surgeon for 'Memory of Love'. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.
Aminatta Forna
#32. No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.
Aminatta Forna
#33. Adrian hears the echo of his own thoughts of earlier in the day, only differently stated. The silent lie.
Aminatta Forna
#34. Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.
Aminatta Forna
#35. I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.
Aminatta Forna
#36. 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.
Aminatta Forna
#37. The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.
Aminatta Forna
#38. When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing.
Aminatta Forna
#39. People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.
Aminatta Forna
#40. We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.
Aminatta Forna
#41. But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations?
Aminatta Forna
#42. I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.
Aminatta Forna
#43. Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive.
Aminatta Forna
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