Top 24 Chinelo Okparanta Quotes
#1. You'll marry your studies? Marry your books? You already have one degree but you want another. You'll marry your degrees?
Chinelo Okparanta
#2. Aunty, whatever the matter, just remember that it is the same moon that wanes today that will be full tomorrow. And even the sun, however long it disappears, it always shines again.
Chinelo Okparanta
#3. Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness.
Chinelo Okparanta
#4. And now she began muttering to herself. "God , who created you, must have known what He did. Enough is enough.
Chinelo Okparanta
#5. This, it seems to me, is the lesson of the Bible: this affirmation of the importance of reflection, and of revision, enough revision to do away with the tired, old, even faulty laws.
Chinelo Okparanta
#6. Suddenly she could see her future in the relationship: a lifetime of feeling like an afterthought.
Chinelo Okparanta
#7. She smiled just a little, as if to hide how powerful the words made her feel, but Chinasa saw it all the same: the way her face seemed to say that she had gotten the vengeance she sought. The kind of vengeance that turned love into a weapon. Tit for tat. You do me, I do you.
Chinelo Okparanta
#8. Wasn't it the belief, after all, that women looked more beautiful during ovulation - or more gorgeous, if you would? At least there was an upside.
Chinelo Okparanta
#9. Also, what if Adam and Ever were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside yourself? What if that's all it was? And why not?
Chinelo Okparanta
#10. ...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.
Chinelo Okparanta
#11. There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.
Chinelo Okparanta
#12. I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world.
Chinelo Okparanta
#13. Happiness is like water,' she says. 'We're always trying to grab onto it, but it's always slipping between our fingers.
Chinelo Okparanta
#15. Man and wife, the Bible said. It was a nice thought, but only in the limited way that theoretical things often are.
Chinelo Okparanta
#16. Sometimes we get confused about what happiness really means. Sometimes we get confused about what path to take to get to happiness.
Chinelo Okparanta
#17. The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there.
Chinelo Okparanta
#18. I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don't. It is my tears that allow me to glide.
Chinelo Okparanta
#19. With a man, life is difficult. Without a man, life is even more difficult.
Chinelo Okparanta
#20. I suppose it's the way we are, humans that we are. Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else's tragedy.
Though it is true, too, that sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs.
Chinelo Okparanta
#21. If this was the rice that God was putting in my basket...there was no point wishing for soup.
Chinelo Okparanta
#22. If theirs was a goal of arriving at versions of themselves that they deemed better - perhaps more valuable - than their current selves, then who could blame them? And yet, they were in fact to be blamed.
Chinelo Okparanta
#24. I had become a little like a coffin: I felt a hollowness in me and a rattling at my seams.
Chinelo Okparanta
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