# Buchi Emecheta

- Quotes: 39
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/buchi-emecheta

## Books

- [Second-Class Citizen](https://www.leafyquotes.com/buchi-emecheta/second-class-citizen.md) — 25 quotes
- [The Joys of Motherhood](https://www.leafyquotes.com/buchi-emecheta/the-joys-of-motherhood.md) — 14 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> (Chapter 1, Page 15)

> Then the thought suddenly struck her. Yes, she would go to school.

> One might think on this evidence that Africans treated their children badly. But to Adah’s people and to Adah herself, this was not so at all; it was the custom. Children, especially girls, were taught to be very useful very early in life, and this had its advantages. For instance, Adah learned very early to be responsible for herself. Nobody was interested in her for her own sake, only in the money she would fetch, and the housework she could do and Adah, happy at being given this opportunity of survival, did not waste time thinking about its rights or wrongs. She had to survive.”

> So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy.

> Not like those of their children who later got caught up in the entangled web of industrialisation. Adah’s Ma had no experience of having to keep up mortgage payments: she never knew what it was to have a family car, or worry about its innards; she had no worries about pollution, the population explosion or race. Was it surprising, therefore, that she was happy, being unaware of the so-called joys of civilisation and all its pitfalls?”

> She felt eight when she was being directed by her dream, for a younger child would not be capable of so many mischiefs. Thinking back on it all now that she was grown up, she was sorry for her parents. But it was their own fault; they should not have had her in the first place, and that would have saved a lot of people a lot of headaches.”

> (Chapter 2, Page 19)

> Every woman should be free to live the life she chooses.

> Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?

> Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me.

> Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity.

> At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept.