Americanah Quotes

″ I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. ”

“These white people think that everybody has their mental problems. ”

“If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional. ”

″ When you make the choice to come to America, you become black. ”

″ If you are not careful in this country, your children will become what you don’t know. ”

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country.”

“He felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be. ”

“Are they between you and the sunset? ”

“That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. ”

″ He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. ”

″ I feel ... I have vegetables instead of ears, like large broccoli sticking out of my head. ”

“I can’t believe it. My president is black like me. ”

“She was no longer sure what was new in Lagos and what was new in herself. ”

“She was inside this silence and she was safe. ”

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.”

“You told him what he wasn’t but you didn’t tell him what he was.”

“They have the kind of things we can eat. ”

“She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers.”

“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

“They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things . . . none of them starving . . . but merely hungry for choice and certainty.”