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The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest QUOTES

The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest QUOTES

1 " They were all on government scholarships - men and women chosen to lead the countries one day soon across the post-independence horizon towards a new Africa where they would design bridges, run schools, plan towns, drain swamps, build hospitals or, as likely become deskbound bureaucrats. "

― Aminatta Forna , The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

2 " It was the way people thought: what you couldn't do anything about you learned to accept. "

― Aminatta Forna , The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

3 " Yes Sierra Leone to me was both utterly familiar and ineffably alien: I knew it but I could not claim to understand it. "

― Aminatta Forna , The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

4 " One afternoon I lay on my bed, inert with mental fatigue, enumerating my many frustrations with the country & with the task I had set myself. It had taken me months of work to get this far, & every step of the way I felt I was pushing against some mighty, unspoken resistance. Time & time again I had felt that hardly a fact or a single item of information had been volunteered; every day I made half a dozen telephone calls; I trekked out to interview anyone who would talk to me, then found myself returning to the same place to ask for more information--questions I had omitted to ask, chase details they did not think, or perhaps wish, to supply. This was as true of people who had no reason to dissemble as of those who did. "

― Aminatta Forna , The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest