Quotes by Aminatta Forna

About Aminatta Forna:

Aminatta Forna is a Scottish-born British writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and three novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010) and The Hired Man (2013). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we star...

Aminatta Forna

How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.

Aminatta Forna

Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the e...

Aminatta Forna

He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is w...

Aminatta Forna

My aloneness had never bothered me; I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

Aminatta Forna

The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.

Aminatta Forna

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

Aminatta Forna

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

Aminatta Forna

My family's a ruling family.

Aminatta Forna

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.

Aminatta Forna

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that ...

Aminatta Forna

I temporarily became a surgeon for 'Memory of Love'. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.

Aminatta Forna

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

Aminatta Forna

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

Aminatta Forna

I don't have very many little fetishes, but the one I do have is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It's just a small china cup, and I get very upset if my husband moves it.

Aminatta Forna

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.

Aminatta Forna

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.

Aminatta Forna

I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.

Aminatta Forna

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

Aminatta Forna

I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.

Aminatta Forna

Author Bio

  • NameAminatta Forna
  • DescriptionAminatta Forna, British author of ''The Devil that Danced on the Water'', ''Ancestor Stones'' and ''The Memory of Love''
  • BornNovember, 1964
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsCommonwealth Writers' Prize