Quotes from Bernardine Evaristo

i love Britain, too, Ams, although less so every time I return, it's become a living memory for me, Britain feels in the past, even when I'm in its present.

furthermore, after decades of religiously marking homework five nights a week, she now loathed doing it with a venom piles of crap piled up on her study desk produced by mostly semi-literates who made her life hell in the classroom mixed ability classrooms? to think she once approved, it didn't raise standards, it lowered them on this she

it's easy to forget that England is made up of many Englands

people have to share everything they do these days, from meals, to nights out, to selfies of themselves half naked in a mirror

I let her know she's an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women she says human beings are complex I tell her not to patronize me

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it

ever since, he's found the corporate lifestyle so stultifying and soul-destroying, he dreams of living in a wigwam in a field of growing his own food

ageing is nothing to be ashamed of especially when the entire human race is in it together although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older because it's such a privilege to not die prematurely

Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation whereupon she walked right back out again in turn a casting director told Dominique she was wasting his time when she turned up for a Victorian drama when there weren't any black people in Britain then she said there were, called him ignorant before also leaving the room and in her case, slamming the door

You lucky I ain't taking a hammer to you, but you're not worth a life sentence.

The moment my father arrived in Britain as a young man, he was brutally stripped of his self-image as an individual and had to assume an imposed identity - as the visual embodiment of centuries of negative misrepresentations.

I see now that my feminism as a young woman was paper thin. I was possessed of the fervor of a born-again and had learned the rhetoric, but not yet examined myself enough to live by and through my values.

Any attempts to essentialist culture into notions of authenticity only succeed in doing the opposite and revealing the interconnectedness of our societies.

It's only when you drive out of London that you get the sense that most of this country is made up of countryside: wide-open fields and a sky uninterrupted by buildings.

When you're a slave you dream of either owning slaves or freeing them.

If we accept that we cannot change other people, or that we cannot change how we ourselves might be contributing to an unhealthy dynamic, then surely the solution is to make a bid for freedom?

d'ailleurs, il n'y a pas de quoi avoir honte de vieillir notamment quand toute la race humaine est concernée même si parfois elle semble être la seule parmi ses amies à vouloir fêter les années qui passent parce que c'est un privilège de ne pas mourir prématurément, leur dit-elle (...)

You're either a figure for fucking or a fucking freak. Everyone needs a one-and-only after a while. I'm twenty-two, Zuky-do. Middle aged! A Venus must 'ave an Adonis. Even if it's just for a while. Bronzed, rippling, adoring, preferably, compliant, essentially. Someone to come home to, to cook a pease pudding for of a winter's night. Look at the facts.

Winsome has listened to her grandchildren's lives since they could speak, and they've never asked about her she understands that young people are consumed by themselves, and her role is to comfort and reassure and be caring towards them when their parents are cross with them

Alle pogingen om cultuur terug te brengen tot opvattingen over authenticiteit kunnen alleen het omgekeerde bewerkstelligen en de onderlinge verbondenheid van onze culturen openbaren.

This is one of the pleasures of a lifelong friendship: so many of your memories are shared.

U godinama nakon toga shvatit ?u da osoba koja ima kontrolu u vezi ovisi o slabom partneru, a ipak ta tobožnja slaba osoba procvate kad oti?e, dok je ona, navodno ja?a, manje sposobna sama se iznijeti. Ako snagu crpiš pod?injavanjem druge osobe, onda si ti slab i ovisan.

She is the Sphinx guarding the city of Thebes. Head of a woman, body of a lioness, wings of an eagle, memory of an elephant, bite of a saltwater crocodile with 2,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, ready to snap my head off.

Don't need to love someone to be compassionate.