novelists-from-ghana

"A marriage built on that will not last. But a marriage wit foundation is the one where your wife, your husband, has a good character"

"I knew I couldn't try to pursue an education when my parents wanted me to marry"

"I had been in the city for many years. And i didn't like city girls. They are too arrogant. And they were spoilt. I jhad tried a couple. And I decided I need an authentic woman from thw village"

"I had done damage. I had to repair it, I didn't know how. I hoped and hoped the damage was not permanent"

"Catharsis, sating of the primordial love for bloodletting."

"Making deals and making sure they suceeded. It was non-stop"

"But neither sages nor pastors offered satisfying counsel."

"Time will never come when the word [Last Next] would be yelled out announcing his own arrived death."

"My mind is weak these days and my memory isn't as good as it used to be. But if I recollect correctly, this woman you talk about has a reputation as a bad girl"

"I discovered that Mother and Father had mentioned. About her character. She did have a very sharp tongue. But i learned to live and deal with it."

"I wonder if you're lost. Or perhaps you're far from home? Maybe you can come inside and wait until the rain stops"

"Solo stands on trial for the murder of his wife."

"But, Akua, niw you must understand. That I am a man. And sometimes I have feelings. For other women. Lat time I went home, I met a woman. I had met her before. My feelings for her were renewed. Now I want to make her my wife. My second wife. And I want your blessing."

"In the beginning her eyes were eyes and she could see clearly. And then they turned into two massive loaves of bread upon which many gathered to feast – a kind of grand banquet in which she only participated as an observer."

"Life was more fully present there and perhaps, on account of that, death would retreat."

"How could he save the life of a man who’d murdered his in laws and then attempted to murder him?"

"And never in Solo’s life did he want to heal anyone as strongly as he wanted to heal the man lying in front of him."

"Manslaughter rather than murder, jail sentence rather than death."

"It started raining badly.... The gods were against me"

"It was ironic. Mother's own marriage wasn't a perfect model. She and father were not divorced. But they lived in different homes, Like strangers"

"I faced more opposition that sunday. After church service, Pator Lawyer Amoah was aghast. He insisted that I shouldn't marry Ama Owusu"

"I spent years avoiding sex with guys because I didn’t want anyone to gossip about me. I wish I had realized sooner that no matter what I did guys would claim to have fucked me every which way under the sun."

"Today I feel like my best sex life is being lived in my imagination. I’m a lot more free in my mind than I am in my body. I dream and fantasise a lot but I don’t necessarily create the kind of experiences that would allow me to enjoy the feelings that I think about."

"I have learned over time that relationships require work. When you’re younger, you have a sense of love as being magical and so relationships happen in that particular space of magic, and it’s easy to feel that’s all one needs, but now I know that relationships require work, and constant work. The desire that is in the relationship also needs to be nurtured, and thought about, and reentered and reimagined."

"Many women lose all the privileges of a free woman when they get married and what they gain is nothing compared to what they lose."

"We achieve freedom when we let go of the weight of societal expectations, and when we find our people – those who love us, care for us, and hold us up when we start slipping."

"I feel most free when I am myself, stripped of all pretences, lounging naked on my bed, my boobies freely rolling to wherever they choose to land, my belly relaxed and soft, my thighs apart, my hands wherever they may choose to lie. With no one around me, I am my most free self."

"I’ve learnt to ask myself every day, Are you happy today? And if the answer is no I make a change."

"He seemed to have no weight at all. There he was winning prizes, playing for the school team, starting a study group. Yet he drew no feeling of importance from anything he did. He floated"

"....to aid even one person is to save an entire world."

"Here, educated people use their intelligence to avoid risk, to accumulate power, money, privilege. We call it security. That makes our choices sound less cowardly, not so greedy"

"The people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay."

"Nothing good can come of a place that refuses to see the pain of the people on whose backs it was built."

"She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits."

"Changes that seem reasonable, natural and basic," Armah says, "the academic world, far from performing as the rational part of a confused universe, seemed peculiarly denatured in its own right"

"Teach me what you know."

"The pain you have endured does not justify the pain you inflict on others."

"Vagina sweet, money sweet pass all, who born fool socialism chop make chop country broke you broken not so? Pray for detention jail man chop free"

"First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one."

"This is my mind. I am the strongest person here."

"Of unconnected consciousness is there more to say beyond the clear recognition this is destruction's keenest tool against the soul?"

"A people losing sight of origins are dead. A people deaf to purposes are lost. Under fertile rain, in scorching sunshine there is no difference: their bodies are mere corpses, awaiting final burial."

"Yet she suspected that in its ten thousand disguises Cinque's Zombi corpse still ruled Africa; that those working to remember the dismembered continent were still fugitives in need of sanctuary from the storm troopers of destruction."

"He saw a fierce, nameless beast, half serpent and half forest cat. The beast had coiled itself around the body of the prince Appia, still alive, and Densu saw it bare its fangs to destroy Appia. In halfawake nightmare state he was in, Densu had only seen the body of the prince. But at the moment when the beast was on the point of sinking its fangs into his neck Densu saw Appia's face. It was his own."

"Have you ever seen a big man without girls"

"Send me words of eloquence."

"Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours."

"The past devours those naive enough to forget it."

"Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens."

"Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence."