My friend [Alex] (alexliu.name) records all the highlights from his readings. You learn a lot by reading through the bits of text that stood out to him. Thought I would share some of my own highlights from this phenomenal book.
Location 153
The rude stranger in the supermarket—who knew what problems he was wrestling with, haggard and thin-lipped as he was—had intended to offend her but had instead prodded her awake.
Location 164
But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her.
Location 241
each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.
Location 518
basking in the attention her face drew but flattening her personality so that her beauty did not threaten.
Location 527
There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.
Location 537
the sprinkle of pimples on her forehead smothered in heavy foundation.
Location 814
she thought how much he looked like what he was, a man full of blanched longings, a middlebrow civil servant who wanted a life different from what he had, who had longed for more education than he was able to get.
Location 890
she was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires.
Location 891
It had all seemed benign before, her mother’s faith, all drenched in grace, and suddenly it no longer was.
Location 892
She wished, fleetingly, that her mother was not her mother, and for this she felt not guilt and sadness but a single emotion, a blend of guilt and sadness.
Location 907
She had always got along with Ifemelu’s mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth.
Location 1211
Here, her father would seem crass, with his unnecessary big words, and her mother provincial and small.
Location 1320
It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the different ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood.
Location 1324
“You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass.
Location 1980
nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves.
Location 2536
He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.
Location 2548
Ifemelu was sorry to have come from Africa, to be the reason that this beautiful woman, with her bleached teeth and bounteous hair, would have to dig deep to feel such pity, such hopelessness.
Location 2890
Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy.
Location 3234
he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa;
Location 3235
in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European.
Location 3241
this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.
Location 3360
He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 3364 she seemed like the kind of wealthy person who did not tip well. Highlight(yellow) - Location 3434 The recruiters, themselves not long out of college, the young who had been sent out to catch the young,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 3534 There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing. Highlight(yellow) - Location 3586 She looked at him, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, so certain in his self-justifications. He was entitled in the way a child was: blindly.
Location 3904
The words came out with the mechanical good cheer of frequent repetition.
Location 3953
She was a woman who kept to herself and asked no favors, who would not lie, who would not accept even a Christmas card from her students because it might compromise her, who accounted for every single kobo spent on any committee she was on, and here she was, behaving as though truth telling had become a luxury that they could no longer afford.
Location 3992
He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness.
Location 4097
It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care?
Location 4184
There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom.
Location 4493
Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos.
Location 4631
they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
Location 4816
There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.
Location 5201
They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her.
Location 5306
“To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.”
Location 5362
He never allowed himself to have an opinion. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said often.
Location 5549
unpolished evidence of their polish.
Location 6534
She was not pretty, her facial features created no harmony, but she carried herself as though she was. Nubile. She made Ifemelu think of that word, with her shapely slenderness, her tiny waist and the unexpected high curves of her breasts.
Location 7420
it did not occur to him to doubt himself.
Location 7493
She did not share his interests—she was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world—but he felt grateful to her, fortunate to be with her.
Location 7570
When Buchi said “Amen!” with that delight, that gusto, Obinze feared she would grow up to be a woman who, with that word “amen,” would squash the questions she wanted to ask of the world.