Ayobami Adebayo Quotes

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

When you are born into a family like mine, you don't really know anything else. But you quickly realise that it's more about other people and how they are dealing with it. Some can be hugely in awe or uncomfortable, but to you, your parents are just your parents.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

If I dyed my hair, my mother would actually disown me.

My mom said, 'You are reckless, and you need to get married.' And I was like, 'Okay.'

I have a friend called James who is in his 40s and he's still not allowed to swear in front of his mum. I find it strange that you can't be yourself and be open with the one person who brought you into this world.

Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.

I grew up in this era where your parents' friends were all called aunt and uncle. And then I had an aunt and an aunt. We saw them on holidays and other times. We never talked about it, but I just understood that they were a couple.

I dug the idea that I was being perceived as the black sheep of my family, but for me, it was like, I was a rebel, and that to me was most important.

I had a beautiful mother and a famous father, and I didn't know where I fit in.

I didn't do anything differently than what my father was doing. It's a really hard family to rebel in. I could have become an accountant. Or I could have become a Republican.

I don't think anyone has a normal family.

As an adult, you think of yourself as being someone else when you're away from your family, but when you come back to your family, you suddenly find yourself back in the exact same role that you always had in your family as a child and as a teenager.

It was not a good thing in my family to be a 'personality.'

The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.

What is one China? You have to tell me what one China looks like. If a girl is to marry into another family, you have to tell her what that family is like.

Society wants happy families.

When you have a big family, certainly with strong personalities, you feel like you have to fall into a role, and I didn't want to be the little sister or the daughter, because that's who you become as an adult.

Being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home. I couldn't figure out whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

There is no pressure from my family to get married.

It's funny 'cos I think a lot about kids who grow up with their parents being really important members of their fields, and they just go the opposite way.

It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.