Home > Author > Chinelo Okparanta
1 " There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no. "
― Chinelo Okparanta , Under the Udala Trees
2 " Let peace be. Let life be. "
3 " ...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all. "
― Chinelo Okparanta , Happiness, Like Water
4 " You'll marry your studies? Marry your books? You already have one degree but you want another. You'll marry your degrees? "
― Chinelo Okparanta
5 " Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness. "
6 " I suppose it's the way we are, humans that we are. Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else's tragedy. Though it is true, too, that sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs. "
7 " Aunty, whatever the matter, just remember that it is the same moon that wanes today that will be full tomorrow. And even the sun, however long it disappears, it always shines again. "
8 " If you set off on a witch-hunt, you will find a witch. When you find her, she will be dressed like any other person. But to you, her skin will glow in stripes of white and black. You will see her broom, and you will hear her witch-cry, and you will feel the effects of her spells on you. No matter how unlike a witch she is, there she will be, a witch, before your eyes. "
9 " Happiness is like water,' she says. 'We're always trying to grab onto it, but it's always slipping between our fingers. "
10 " I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world. "
11 " But we were in love, or at least I believed myself completely to be. I craved [her] presence for no other reason than to have it.It was certainly friendship too.This intimate companionshipwith someone who knew me in a way that no one else did.It was a heighten state of friendship.Maybe it was also a bit of infatuation.But what I knew for sure was that it was also love.Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness. "
12 " I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don't. It is my tears that allow me to glide. "
13 " Shame is the power we give others to wield over us. "
14 " Man and wife, the Bible said. It was a nice thought, but only in the limited way that theoretical things often are. "
15 " The power of science. Sometimes she thought how one day even love might become like a science. Everyone saying exactly the same right words. Everyone reacting the same exact ways. Love feeling and tasting and looking exactly the way some scientists in some laboratory determined that it should. Perhaps a development like that would solve many romantic disputes, maybe even bring down divorce rates to a cool zero percent. "
16 " The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there. "
17 " Also, what if Adam and Ever were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside yourself? What if that's all it was? And why not? "
18 " This, it seems to me, is the lesson of the Bible: this affirmation of the importance of reflection, and of revision, enough revision to do away with the tired, old, even faulty laws. "
19 " If this was the rice that God was putting in my basket...there was no point wishing for soup. "
20 " Happiness is like water,’ she says. ‘We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers. "
