Changes : A Love Story
Changes: A Love Story ( first Published in 1991 ) is a novel by Ama Ata Aidoo chronicling a period of the life of a career-centred Ghanaian woman as she divorces her first husband and marries into a polygamist union.
Quotes
[edit]- Is Esi too an African woman? She not only is, but there are plenty of them around these days. . . these days. . . these days
- Chapter 1.,Oko, thinking whilst lying in bed.
- But Opokuya wasn’t having any of her self-pity. So she countered rather heavily. “Why is life so hard on the non-professional African woman? Eh? Esi, isn’t life even harder for the poor rural and urban African woman?
- Chapter 6.
- Esi was thinking that the whole thing sounded so absolutely lunatic and so ‘contemporary African’ that she would save her sanity probably by not trying to understand it. The only choice left to her was to try and enter into the spirit of it.
- Chapter 1 1.
- From the inner room Esi heard them and pain filled her chest. She could never be as close to her mother as her mother was to her grandmother. Never, never, never. And she knew why.
- Esi, Chapter 14, after returning home one weekend to visit with her mother.
- Ali phoned regularly to announce his imminent departures. He phoned from the different cities and towns inside and outside the country to which he traveled. He phoned to report his arrivals. In between his travels, he phoned regularly when the telephone lines permitted. He and Esi always had good telephone conversations.
- Chapter 23, Narrator.
- This was a Friday evening. As a strictly brought-up Muslim who had actually gone to the mosque earlier in the afternoon, there was only one way to interpret his encounter with this fascinating woman: a gift from Allah. So he should not let himself feel too bad about the way the encounter had ended. If it was His will, things would right themselves in the end"
- Chapter 1, pg. 4.
- Just ask anybody. There are many thoughts that come into our minds which we are not aware of, at the time we are doing the thinking. Feelings can be even worse" **Chapter 2, pg. 5.
- “Love? Love? Love is not safe, my lady silk, love is dangerous. It is deceitfully sweet like wine from a fresh palm tree at dawn. Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need to count on human strength, and when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.”
- “My lady Silk, remember that a man always gains in stature any way he chooses to associate with a woman - including adultery...but in her association with a man, a woman is always in danger of being diminished.”
- “You know perfectly well that if ever you really want to, you can come back to me," he said without the slightest trace of irony and cynicism, and left.”
“Guilt is born in the same hour with pleasure, like anything in this universe and its enemy.”
“Our people have said that for any marriage to work, one party has to be a fool”
