Book Review: Quotes from So Long A Letter by Mariama Ba

Hello good people!

I think by now if you are a regular on this blog you know that if I enjoy a book as much as I did this one quotes are bound to follow. This instance is no different. So, what do you say I cut the small talk and get right into it?

"Confiding in others allays pain."

"One does not fix appointments with fate. Fate grasps whom it wants, when it wants. When it moves in the direction of your desires, it brings you plentitude. But more often than not, it unsettles, crosses you. Then one has to endure."

"Death, the tenuous passage between two opposite worlds, one tumultuous the other still." 

"Death is just as beautiful as life has been."

"I have enough memories in me to ruminate upon. And these are what I am afraid of, for they smuck of bitterness.'

"I think of all the blind people, the world over moving in darkness. I think of all the paralysed the world over, dragging themselves about. I think of all the lepers the world over, wasted by their disease.

Victims of a sad fate which you did not choose, compared with your lamentations, what is my quarrel, clearly motivated."

"Your stoicism has made you not violent or subversive but true heroes, unknown in the mainstream of history, never upsetting established order, despite your miserable condition."

"They forgot the source of this easy life; first up in the morning, last to go to bed, always working. "

"You want to draw a line between heartfelt love and physical love. I say that there can be no union of bodies without the heart's acceptance,however little that may be. "

"I counted backwards to determine where the break in the thread had occurred from which everyhting had unwound."

"Every night when he went out he would unfold and try on several of his suits before setting on one. The others, impatiently rejected, would slip on the floor. I would have to fold them again and put them back in their places; and this extra work , I discovered, I was doing only to help him in his effort to be elegant in his seduction of another woman."

"Leave! Draw a clean line through the past. Turn over a page in which not everything was bright, certainly, but at least all was clear."

"A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness."

"A victim, she wanted to be the oppressor."

"For pain, even when it's past, leaves the same marks on the individual when recalled."

"All or nothing. Adieu." *This one is my favorite by the way!*

"I went back to my loneliness...I wore it again as one wears a familiar garment. It's cut suited me well. I moved easily in it..."

"But Daba is like all the young, without pity."

"Life is an eternal compromise."

"Daba is my wife. She is not my slave nor my servant."

"Does it mean that one can't have modernism without a lowering of moral standards?"

"And also one is a mother in order to understand the inexplicable. One is a mother to shield when the lightning streaks the night, when thunder shakes the earth, when mud bogs one down. One is a mother to lighten the darkness. One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end."

"One is a mother so as to face the flood."

"What does one gain from pleasures? Early ageing, debasement , no doubt about it..."

"Despite everything-disappointments and humiliations-hope still lives on within me."

Mariama Ba

"It is from the dirty and nauseating humus that the green  plant sprouts into life, and I can feel new buds springing up in me."

"My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows. I know that the field of our gains is unstable, the retention of conquests difficult social constraints are ever present and male egoism resists. "

"To love one another! If only each partner could move sincerely towards the other! If each could only melt in the other! If each would only accept the other's successes and failures! If each would only praise the other's qualities instead of listing his faults! If each could only correct bad habits without harping on about them! If each could penetrate the other's most secret haunts to forestall failure and be a support while tending to the evils that are repressed."

Is this book deep or what? I hope this gets you all fired up to read it and throw in a couple of quotes that I may have overlooked. To read my book review go here.

Have a good one!