But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the I have to worry about the truth that can be And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the...
Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progre...
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry,
Mnóstwo zjawisk, które dziś określamy mianem syndromów, miało wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy były prostsze. To właśnie dlatego ludzie mówią o nich stare, dobre czasy.
It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?
She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiar...
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and fi...
Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just...
You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.
Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreemen...
By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought that Magid, Magid at least, will, in a matter of four hours, be flying east from this place and its dem...
Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several sma...
A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’ . . . ‘And I don’t know why I’m surprised. You don’t even notice it – you never notice. You think it’s normal. Everyw...
American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know wh...
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talen...
You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from se...
Everybody knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they are likely to become antisocial.