Many girls spend too much time trying to be nice to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the feelings of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. We hav...
Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering. She had often thought it a little silly, the idea of suffering for love, but now she understood.
Look, all of them are white women. This one is supposed to be Hispanic, we know this because they wrote two Spanish words here, but she looks exactly like this white woman, no difference in her skin t...
Life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.
Les enseñemos a las niñas a sentir vergüenza. ‘Cierra las piernas, cúbrete’. Les hacemos sentir como si por haber nacido mujeres ya fueran culpables de algo. Y así, las niñas crecen y se convierten en...
Later, when she came to know of the letters he wrote to Congress about Darfur, the teenagers he tutored at the high school on Dixwell, the shelter he volunteered at, she thought of him as a person who...
La primera vez que impartí una clase de posgrado de escritura estaba preocupada. No por el temario, porque lo tenía bien preparado y estaba enseñando lo que me gustaba. Lo que me preocupaba era qué ro...
I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of...
It’s true. And they don’t just spend a lot, they expect to spend a lot. I met this guy the other day, and he was telling me how he started his satellite-dish business about twenty years ago. This was...
It’s a novel, right? What’s it about? Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
It was not a physical fatigue—he went to the gym regularly and felt better than he had in years—but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He got up and went out to the verandah; th...
It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, th...
It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were det...
It seemed so natural, to talk to him about the odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.
It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow linked to blood, since love for...
It is not hard, Ifemelu said firmly. You are using the wrong comb. And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.
It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.
Is it a good life, Daddy? Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matt...
In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity.
In every culture in the world, female sexuality is about shame. Even cultures that expect women to be sexy−like many in the West−still do not expect them to be sexual.