Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
He felt helplessly weak, the kind of weakness that came with illness, with grief.
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless.
He wished he could truly feel sorry for her friend the politician who had been killed, but politicians were not like normal people, they were politicians.
He threw his legs out with an aggressive confidence: the gait of a person who would not ask for directions but remained sure that he would somehow get there.
Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story.
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?
God always makes sense but not always a human kind of sense.
Have faith is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx.
But he understood even as a young boy that it was not that they did not love him, rather it was that they often forgot that they did because they loved each other too much.
He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.
You know, it really isn’t as simple as you think it is. You don’t know what it is to love an asshole.
And yet there was something about it that was exceedingly fragile; it was as if Chinedu could conceive of faith only in extremes, as if an acknowledgment of a middle ground would mean the risk of losing everything.
But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called "participation," and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.
Whenever he drained a pot of boiled beans, he thought of the slimy sink as politician.
In the silence that separated them he suddenly felt grateful that her crispness gave him no space for self-pity, gave him nothing to hide behind.
She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.
They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.
Speaking of death in English has always had, for me, a disquieting finality.
Above, clouds like dyed cotton wool hang low, so low I feel I can reach out and squeeze the moisture from them.
When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.
Church suddenly became like Father Christmas, something that you never question when you are a child but when you become an adult you realize that the man in that Father Christmas costume is actually your neighbor from down the street.
Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.