Top 60 Bernardine Evaristo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m not a victim, don’t ever treat me like a victim, my mother didn’t raise me to be a victim.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

2. “I am an individual, specific, not generic.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

3. “I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women she says human beings are complex I tell her not to patronize me.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

4. “What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

5. “Who needs enemies when your life partner undermines you on a regular basis?”

— Bernardine Evaristo

6. “Let us wonder at how X was just a rare letter until algebra came along and made it something special that can be unravelled to reveal inner value.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

7. “Truth is, both of us was desperate to be anything other than what we was.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

8. “Courtney added that as she only fancies black men and is likely going to have mixed-race children, her ‘white privilege’ is in any case going to be seriously dented, like at least 50% of it, and it’s incredible in this day and age that she’d never met any black people in the flesh before she came to university from Dartingford which is entirely white except for three Asians.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

9. “Her friendship with Amma is based on historic loyalty and comfortable familiarity rather than shared interests and perspectives.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

10. “Very small children don’t care about skin colour, Rachel, until they’re brainwashed by their parents.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

11. “Divorce: such a spiteful-sounding word – but such an appealing concept. Marriage: such a softly seductive word – but such a spiteful reality.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

12. “Life is about taking risks, not about burying your head in the sand.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

13. “Some folk have to react against something: parents, siblings, government, society. They think they have free will, when all they doing is wilfully opposing.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

14. “Courtney replied that she herself is a big fan of the non sequitur which really only means that a conversation is free-flowing and intuitive, as opposed to following a predictable trajectory, so to speak.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

15. “He’ll be moulded by America, that’s for sure, just by being there. He won’t even be aware it’s happening. He’ll be filled with the American sense of self-belief, and the sense of can-do, and the Harvard sense of entitlement.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

16. “Thereafter she saw his intellectual showmanship as a performance, deep down he could be as vulnerable as anyone.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

17. “African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you’re going to drive yourself mad and, I’m sorry to say, everyone else with you.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

18. “You lucky I ain’t taking a hammer to you, but you’re not worth a life sentence.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

19. “We slaves don’t end relationships. Other people do it for us. Often we don’t start them either, other people do it for us. We’re encouraged to breed merely to increase the workforce.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

20. “Megan should have been grateful and accepted her cute status, what girl doesn’t want to be told how lovely she is, how special? except it felt wrong, even at a young age, something in her realized that her prettiness was supposed to make her compliant, and when she wasn’t, when she rebelled, she was letting down all those invested in her being adorable.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

21. “I wish you were around to be her grandma, to tell her what it was like for you growing up, and stories about me from when I was too young to remember.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

22. “Bibi replied, gender’s a social construction, most of us are born male or female but the concepts of masculinity and femininity are society’s inventions, none of it is innate, are you following? no, not really.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

23. “Winsome likes the fact that Rachel is curious enough to know who her grandmother was before she was a mother, when she was a person in her own right, as she described it except she never has been, first she was a daughter, then a wife and mother, and now also a grandmother and great-grandmother.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

24. “Yazz was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

25. “Amma experienced commitment to one person as imprisonment, she hadn’t left home for a life of freedom and adventure to end up chained to another person’s desires.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

26. “I see now that my feminism as a young woman was paper thin. I was possessed of the fervor of a born-again and had learned the rhetoric, but not yet examined myself enough to live by and through my values.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

27. “Twitter is the perfect platform for the permanently outraged who want to express opinions through short statements without having to engage in proper arguments or defend positions.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

28. “I tell Mum she married a patriarch look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s and your point is? you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women she says human beings are complex I tell her not to patronize me.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

29. “Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation whereupon she walked right back out again.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

30. “Dominique began to regret allowing Nzinga to do everything and make decisions for her she started to yearn to do the housework herself, yearn to cook, to clean, to do a job that was more intellectually demanding her life was becoming empty of purpose other than to love Nzinga unconditionally, and, increasingly, obey her even the simplest things became a source of difficulty.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

31. “Nzinga had suggested her relationship history of blonde girlfriends might be a sign of self-loathing; you have to ask yourself if you’ve been brainwashed by the white beauty ideal, sister, you have to work a lot harder on your black feminist politics, you know.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

32. “She realized that knowing someone comes from money isn’t the same as witnessing the extent of it in close proximity.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

33. “Carole loves dancing like a warrior queen to frenzied beats of the war-painted shamanistic godfather, Fela Kuti.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

34. “Nzinga didn’t miss a beat in replying that black women need to identify racism wherever we find it, especially our own internalized racism, when we’re filled with such a deep self-loathing we turn against our own.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

35. “This is one of the pleasures of a lifelong friendship: so many of your memories are shared.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

36. “If there’s one thing she’s learned in the past forty-eight hours, anyone can be a relative.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

37. “Shirley had long felt angry on behalf of her brothers who’d also been harassed by the police since they were young all black men had to learn to handle it, all black men had to be tough and when the police killed or beat someone, they were allowed to investigate themselves, and exonerated the accused.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

38. “Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

39. “To be honest, it felt so distant from us, we din’t give it much thought. Our world was made up of our immediate neighbours and foreign meant the people of the midlands or fenlands.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

40. “She is the Sphinx guarding the city of Thebes. Head of a woman, body of a lioness, wings of an eagle, memory of an elephant, bite of a saltwater crocodile with 2,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, ready to snap my head off.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

41. “I don’t want you to give in, I want you to change, to understand my reasoning at a deeper level and accept it as the truth.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

42. “It’s only in the past ten years it’s been reclaimed by nature, an aggressive beast consuming everything when you let it rampage unhindered.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

43. “My own kind? If I had to pinpoint a moment when the human race divided into the severe distinctions of blak and whyte, that was it: people belonged to one of two colours and in the society I was about to join my colour, not my personality or ability, would determine my fate.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

44. “Dominique guessed her own sexual preferences from puberty, wisely kept them to herself, unsure how her friends or family would react, not wanting to be a social outcast she tried boys a couple of times they enjoyed it she endured it.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

45. “Yazz sometimes has sleepless nights worrying she’ll be alone for the whole of her life if she can’t get a proper boyfriend at nineteen what hope is there for when she’s older?”

— Bernardine Evaristo

46. “If we accept that we cannot change other people, or that we cannot change how we ourselves might be contributing to an unhealthy dynamic, then surely the solution is to make a bid for freedom?”

— Bernardine Evaristo

47. “Winsome wished he hadn’t awakened a longing in her that he wouldn’t satisfy. He’d given her a taste of himself and then withdrawn it. She didn’t hate him for it, she wanted him more because of it.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

48. “London that evening.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

49. “I could sense the surge of all those Ambossans who for years had filled those brightly lit tunnels during what they called the Rushing Hour. All those scurrying feet and harried minds. All those sugar-loving, coffee-drinking, baccy-smoking, rum-sipping commuters, most of whom hadn’t a thought about who provided their little pleasures, their little dependencies.”

— Bernardine Evaristo

50. “Any attempts to essentialist culture into notions of authenticity only succeed in doing the opposite and revealing the interconnectedness of our societies.”

— Bernardine Evaristo