America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and region—became clear.
Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
She was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires.
The most unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things. The
Puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume them...
Dijo que era la exagerada gratitud derivada de la inseguridad del inmigrante.
An endless sheet of heads and placards held high.
With Curt, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares...She was lighter and leaner; she was Curt's Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress.
We police girls. We praise girls for virginity but we don't praise boys for virginity.
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know. I have three...
We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.
They said soon to each other often, and soon gave their plan the weight of something real.
They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.
They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should ever know.
They also found a burial chamber, didn’t they?’ Richard asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you think it was used by the king?’ Pa Anozie gave Richard a long, pained look and mumbled something for a while, looking grie...
The writer had accused me of being ‘angry’, as though ‘being angry’ were something to be ashamed of. Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I am angry about sexism.
The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become.
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned.
The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.
The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?