Little Family
Ishmael Beah
Top 10 Best Quotes
“They always shared equally, even if all they had was a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit. Today she had brought back fried fish and stewed onions with bread and other things that you would not put together if you had the luxury of considering the pleasure of the mouth.”
“Why was it that those who were about to shatter your lives always demanded order from you, when such directives were invariably a prelude to chaos?”
“What a constant creation life was! Any day, any hour, any minute, something good or bad happened and became part of you for a lifetime.”
“Those who searched the day for something to eat were not interested in documents, sensitive or not.”
“The traders standing nearby, or really most anyone doing just well enough to pay for the services of people like him, needed to be reassured that those they were considering hiring were in a state of sufficient wretchedness that they could be paid as little as possible for their labor, and never succeed enough to pull themselves up from that state. Thus, the boss men reassured themselves of their own importance. Pull-down-and-keep-down syndrome was how Elimane thought of it.”
“Poverty has a great appetite for eating one’s dignity, but Elimane was one of those people who fought to keep his, even when that was the only battle he was winning.”
“Now the red caps scanned the crowd for whoever might be eyeing them displeasingly. And yet if you turned away, this might also be interpreted as a sign of disrespect. It was hard to know how, or where, to look. No one with eyes, in other words, was safe”
“He didn’t like remembering such things, but by now he was used to the way life was punctuated by such moments, which sent hooks into parts of the past one might prefer to forget.”
“Every Independence Day since Khoudi could remember, the protests had grown, as people had woken to the irony of celebrating freedoms that existed only on paper.”
“Elimane had taught the little family to make a point of memorizing the current prices of all sort of commonly needed goods and services; asking the price was essentially announcing your lack of street smarts and pleading to be overcharged.”
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Book Keywords:
family, food, nostalgia, documents, syndrome, colonization, poverty, unrest, beah, independence, wonder, military, caring, dishonesty, life, traders, order, reminiscence, sharing, street-smart, scarcity
