Aminatta Forna

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.

— Aminatta Forna

I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all.

— Aminatta Forna

My family's a ruling family.

— Aminatta Forna

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

— Aminatta Forna

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

— Aminatta Forna

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

— Aminatta Forna

“There are after all, and as Laura said, so many summers.”

— Aminatta Forna

“We are so used to the elephant in the room that sometimes we forget it is there”

— Aminatta Forna

“When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing.”

— Aminatta Forna

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

— Aminatta Forna

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

— Aminatta Forna

“Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.”

— Aminatta Forna

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told…

— Aminatta Forna

“How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do…

— Aminatta Forna

“There's nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody…

— Aminatta Forna

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

— Aminatta Forna

“For a long time, as I waited for her to return, I believed she knew I was there behind the trees and…

— 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…

— 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…

— Aminatta Forna

“People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of…

— Aminatta Forna

“He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a…

— Aminatta Forna

“The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work…

— 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…

— Aminatta Forna

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman…

— Aminatta Forna

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in…

— Aminatta Forna

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work…

— Aminatta Forna

“At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover,…

— 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…

— Aminatta Forna

“Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and…

— 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

“There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.”

— Aminatta Forna

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want…

— 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…

— Aminatta Forna

“We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young…

— Aminatta Forna

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

— Aminatta Forna

“How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip…

— Aminatta Forna

“And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to…

— Aminatta Forna

“I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that…

— Aminatta Forna

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me…

— Aminatta Forna