10 Americanah Quotes about Depression and Existentialism

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the story of a young Nigerian girl named Ifemelu. The book traces her life in both Nigeria and America. In doing so, the author touches on a large assortment of crucial topics governing human life, including race, immigrant experiences in the U.S, existentialism, and love.

Here are 10 Americanah Quotes about Depression and Existentialism

Americanah Quotes about Depression and Existentialism:―

1.

She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not.

2.

The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.

3.

At first, she gave herself a month. A month to let her self-loathing seep away, then she would call Obinze. But a month passed and still, she kept Obinze sealed in silence, gagged her own mind so that she would think of him as little as possible. She still deleted his e-mails unread. Many times she started to write to him, she crafted e-mails, and then stopped and discarded them. She would have to tell him what happened, and she could not bear the thought of telling him what happened. She felt shamed; she had failed.

4.

The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.

5.

And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine – “You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card – and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

6.

He paused, shifted. “Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.” For a long time she stared at him. He was saying what she wanted to hear and yet she stared at him.

Also Read: 25 Americanah Quotes about Love, Life, and the Space in Between

7.

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.

8.

“I don’t have depression,” she said. Years later, she would blog about this: “On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They refuse to Know.”

9.

Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.