Quotes from Bernardine Evaristo

Her friendship with Amma is based on historic loyalty and comfortable familiarity rather than shared interests and perspectives

I'm not a victim, don't ever treat me like a victim, my mother didn't raise me to be a victim.

Waris said it's crazy that people are so stupid to think over one and a half billion Muslims all think and act the same way, a Muslim man carries out a mass shooting or blows people up and he's called a terrorist, a white man does the same thing and he's called a mad man both sets are mad, Yazz

Who needs enemies when your life partner undermines you on a regular basis?

one thing she's learnt is that falling hopelessly, helplessly in love is actually a highly selective process

Hazel said novels was better value than poetry books because they had more words in them, poetry books was a rip-off (Winsome doesn't think Hazel should be in their reading group)

Courtney added that as she only fancies black men and is likely going to have mixed-race children, her 'white privilege' is in any case going to be seriously dented, like at least 50% of it, and it's incredible in this day and age that she'd never met any black people in the flesh before she came to university from Dartingford which is entirely white except for three Asians

Life is about taking risks, not about burying your head in the sand

white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race

I don't want you to give in, I want you to change, to understand my reasoning at a deeper level and accept it as the truth.

infrastructures they're actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they're the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!

She likes to walk barefoot inside the house, even in winter It's one of the secretes of her long-lasting mobility, keeping her toes spread and feet grounded, same as all the other beasts of nature Hooves, that's what she's got hooves

it took her years to realise she wasn't being slow and stupid, she leaned the hard way to shoehorn herself into debates, to force them to explain exactly what the hell they were talking about, to hold them to account.

God a-damn me the day I chose to enter this hellish so-called marriage instead of following my Morris-loving, sweet-loving, full-blooded, hot-blooded, pumping-rumping, throbbing organ of an uncontainable, unrestrainable, undetainable man-loving heart .

she's never complained about her lot, or argued with him, a sure sign she's oppressed

Winsome likes the fact that Rachel is curious enough to know who her grandmother was before she was a mother, when she was a person in her own right, as she described it except she never has been, first she was a daughter, then a wife and mother, and now also a grandmother and great-grandmother.

there is someone for everyone in this world

Yazz was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist

Divorce: such a spiteful-sounding word – but such an appealing concept. Marriage: such a softly seductive word – but such a spiteful reality.

She realized that knowing someone comes from money isn't the same as witnessing the extent of it in close proximity

African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you're going to drive yourself mad and, I'm sorry to say, everyone else with you

c'mon, delete all negative thoughts, Carole, release the past and look to the future with positivity and the lightness of a child unencumbered by emotional baggage life is an adventure to be embraced with an open mind and loving heart

Megan should have been grateful and accepted her cute status, what girl doesn't want to be told how lovely she is, how special? except it felt wrong, even at a young age, something in her realized that her prettiness was supposed to make her compliant, and when she wasn't, when she rebelled, she was letting down all those invested in her being adorable

I was grateful to have him to support and steer me, even though he wasn't particularly good-looking or with a dashing personality, both attributes I'd imagined for a husband before I was mature enough to accept that it was easier to dream than it was to make the dream come true