Americanah Quotes

“Soon," he said in his letter. They said "soon" to each other often, and "soon" gave their plan the weight of something real.”

“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”

“You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”

“Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.”

“On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, “But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi”

“It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair”

“You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.""Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.”

“White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening”

“he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch”