Novelists from Nigeria

"I said: "A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces". In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: "I am a tiger". When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there."

"The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny."

"There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?"

"[T]he PDP, on whose platform he stands, represents the most harrowing of this nation’s nightmares over and beyond even the horrors of the Abacha regime. If he wishes to be considered on his own merit, now is time for him, as well as others similarly enmeshed, to exercise the moral courage that goes with his repudiation of that party, a dissociation from its past, and a pledge to reverse its menacing future. We shall find him an alternative platform on which to stand, and then have him present his credentials along those of other candidates engaged in forging a credible opposition alliance."

""Come January 20, 2017; watch my WOLEXIT" [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/nobel-prize-winner-wole-soyinka-donald-trump-throws-away-green-card-a7450141.html"

"England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there....We should assemble all those who are pure and cannot abide other faiths, put them all in rockets, and fire them into space.....A virus has attacked the world of sense and sensibility, and it has spread to Nigeria....The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world-as if someone had given them a new stature...Al Qaeda is the descendent of this phenomenon. The proselytization of Islam became vigorous after this. People went to Saudi Arabia. Madrassas were established everywhere."

"The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism."

"the contemporary novel . . . I've read one or two: Rushdie, I've enjoyed, again, exceptionally, Marquez, I love his works: that's another exception. Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing. Then that black American woman writer, Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Song of Solomon: she's a fascinating writer. Umberto Eco . . . But generally I don't read novels."

"Sidi feels empowered by seeing her beauty for the first time in the magazine prints. She recognizes that her beauty is a commodity, allowing her agency to make a future for herself. This is a novel idea: choosing one's own future is reserved for men."

"It is five full months since last / I took a wife"

"The greedy dog! Insatiate camel of a foolish, doting race."

"How often must I tell you, Sidi, that / A grown-up girl must cover up her... / Her... shoulders? I can see quite... quite / A good portion of—that!"

"(Lakunle, 2)"

"What I boast is known in Lagos, that city / Of magic, in Badagry where Saro women bathe / In gold, even in smaller towns less than / Twelve miles from here..."

"(Lakunle, 5)"

"Bush-girl you are, bush girl you'll always be; / Uncivilized and primitive—bush-girl!"

"(Lakunle, 9)"

"My Ruth, my Rachel, Esther, Bathsheba / Thou sum of fabled perfections / From Genesis to Revelations"

"(Lakunle, 20)"

"Sadiku, I am young and brimming; he is spent. / I am the twinkle of a jewel / But he is the hind-quarters of a lion!"

"(Sidi, 23)"

"No! I do not envy him! / Just one woman for me!"

"(Lakunle, 26)"

"To husband his wives surely ought to be / A man's first duties—at all times."

"(Sidi, 47)"

"I do not hate progress, only its nature / Which makes all roofs and faces look the same."

"(Baroka, 52)"

"Moreover, I will admit, / It solves the problem of her bride-price too. / A man must live or fall by his true / Principles. That, I had sworn, / Never to pay."

"(Lakunle, 61)"

"Lakunle, last seen, having freed himself of Sadiku, clearing a space for the young girl."

"(Soyinka, 64)"

"The accumulated heritage—that is what we are celebrating. Mali. Chaka. Songhai. Glory. Empires."

"I see we’ve got another of the good old days. Obaneji [on the contrary]."

"Will you take my case?"

"When you see a man hurrying, he has got a load on his back. Do you think I live emptily that I will take another's cause for pay or mercy?"

"The world is big, but the dead are bigger"

"This whole family business sickens me. Let everybody lead their own lives,""

"These rites of the dead. I do not know why you take them on,""

"Aroni has taken control. That is when the guilty become afraid."

"Adenebi becomes defensive and says, "Have you no feeling for those who died?""

"Why don't you confess it? You are the type who would rather die in your bed."

""I have a particular aversion to being mauled by women"

"Recognition is the curse I carry with me."

"Doesn't she look like the type that would drive men to madness and self-destruction?"

"When your businessmen ruin the lesser ones, do you go crying to them?""

"The guests we were sent are slaves and lackeys. They have only come to undermine our strength. To preach to us how ignoble we are."

"The descendants of our great forebears...let them symbolize all that is noble in our nation.""

"A King does not become a menial just because he puts down his crown to eat."

"A shilling's vegetable must appease a halfpenny spice."

"The nude shanks of a king is not a sight for children - it will blind them."

"It was our fathers who said, not I - a crown is a burden when the king visits his favourite's chambers. When the king's wrapper falls off in audience, wise men know he wants to be left alone."

"It is a mindless clown who dispenses thanks as a fowl scatters meal not caring where it falls."

"Only a foolish child lets a father prostrate to him."

"We lift the King's umbrella higher than men but it never pushes the sun in the face."

"The ostrich also sports plumes but I've yet to see that wise bird leave the ground."

"When the dog hides a bone does he not throw up sand?"

"Age has shrunk the tortoise and the shell is full of air pockets."

"When a squirrel seeks sanctuary up the iroko tree the hunter's chase is ended."

"If the young sapling bends, the old twig if it resists the wind, can only break."

"It's a foolish elder who becomes a creditor, since he must wait until the other world, or outlive his debtors."

"You say you get pride and you are still a conductor on a bolekaja."

"Nonsense, we run a bus. The seats face where you are going"

"Do you take me for a common gawper after misery?... My bed is among the dead, and when the road rises a victory cry to break my sleep I hurry to a disgruntled swam of souls full of spite for their rejected bodies"

"...There are dangers in the Quest I know, but the Word may be found companion not to life, but Death."

"God rot your coward bones! Do you think not enough people die here that you must come and threaten me with death. You spurious spew. You instrument of mortgage. You unlicensed appendage of the steering wheel..."

"It’s my life that’s gone into his. I haven’t burrowed so deep to cast good earth onto worthless seeds…."

"Power comes from bending Nature to your will."

"What is one flesh from another? So I tried it again, just to be sure of myself. It was the first step to power, you understand. Power in its purest sense. The end of inhibitions. The conquest of weakness of your too human flesh with all its sentiment."

"Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth."

"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away"

"For me, justice is the first condition of humanity."

"I have always held the view that when you have that situation, you must refuse to be part of it"

"A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces"

"This market is my roost. When I come among the women I am a chicken with a hundred mothers."

"When they get this way there is nothing you can do. It's simply hammering against a brick wall."

"You know this business has to be stopped, Simon. And you are the only man who can do it."

"Is there now a streak of light at the end of the passage, a light I dare not look upon?"

"Then I slowly realised that your greatest art is the art of survival. But at least have the humility to let others survive in their own way."

"Because he could not bear to let honour fly out of doors, he stopped it with his life. The son has proved the father Elesin, and there is nothing left in your mouth to gnash but infant gums."

"Things do not always happen as one plans. There are many disappointments in life. There is always the unexpected. You plan carefully, you decide on one step after another, and then...well, that is life. We are not God. So you see, one cannot afford to be weighed down by the unexpected. You will find that only determination will bring one through, sheer determination. And faith in God. Don't ever neglect your prayers...."

"Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you"

"Wild Christian shushed him, but I saw no difference in both their attitudes. I was overwhelmed by only one fact- there was neither justice nor logic in the world of grown-ups"

"It is time to commence the mental shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and their discipline"

"Change was impossible to predict. A tempo, a mood would have settled over the house, over guests, relations, casual visitors, poor relations, 'cousins,' strays – all recognized within a tangible pattern of feeling – and then it would happen!"

"Man is a bird without wings and a tree without roots."

"The ground that man walks on, has it not always been there?"

"We are the giants who bestride the world like a colossus, while others are mere mortals."

"Power is transient, but the deeds of those who wield it can leave an indelible mark on history."

"Ideas, like everything else, can be corrupted. Power is like that: it pollutes everything it touches."

"We must remember that the only true giants are those who walk with the people, not over them."

"Trouble me no further. The fooleries of beings whom I have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility."

"Now what am I thinking of? I must be getting tired. No sensible man burns the house to cook a little yam."

"When your business men ruin the lesser ones, do you go crying to them? I also have no pity for the one who invested foolishly. Investors, that is all they ever were—to me."

"What are you? Men have killed for me. Men have died for me. Have you flints in your eye? Fool, have you never lived?""

"The totem, my final insult. The final taunt from the human pigs."

"Envy, but not from prowess of his adze."

"My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility."

"For the fire consumes all but the arsonist."

"Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective."

"If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?"

"Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form...."

"There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life."

"The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times."

"...the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations."

"Everyone is linked, all our actions have ramifications, and music is a teacher of this interconnected reality."

"In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health."

"The very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent."

"There is peace in being a stranger."

"But then I am a woman. I have a woman’s longings and weaknesses."

"A village which cannot produce its own carrier contains no men."

"Surely it is too much to ask a man to give up his own soil."

"Ours is a strong breed my son. It is only a strong breed that can take this boat to the river year after year and wax stronger on it. I have taken down each year’s evils for over twenty years. I hoped you would follow me."

"My themed reading for both flights was Wole Soyinka, anything I had not yet read by the Nigerian novelist, memoirist, poet, and playwright. Because New York City was our final destination, I lingered over a poem of his titled "New York, U.S.A," which had been published more than a decade earlier. "Control was wrested from your pilot's hands,/And yours, mid-Atlantic, hapless voyager./Deafened the engine's last descent/To all but disordered echoes of your feet.""

"I like a writer like Ngugi, who lashes out, because he knows what is good and bad in writing. And I think this is true of Wole Soyinka, too... I admire Soyinka because I think he's continuous, much more continuous, as a writer…Wole Soyinka deserves the Nobel Prize."

"What I sensed in Soyinka is that, for the most part, as a middle-aged man he is able to look back on his childhood and still see his early life with that fresh eye."

"Now, the most eloquent irreligious individual voice in Nigeria is our first Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is an eminent literary scholar. He has consistently argued for tolerance and respect for the humanity of all in the face of religious intolerance and extremism. Soyinka has not minced words in condemning the unconscionable religious gladiators in the region that have often turned the country into a theatre of absurdity and holy wars. He has been consistent in his condemnation of the jihadists and crusaders who often orchestrate religious bloodletting in their quest to implement Sharia law or to further some self-styled divine mandate. While I cannot say for sure how impactful his rational appeals are on policies and programs, Soyinka’s statements are sources of hope and light at times of darkness and despair. I can say for certain that on occasions when religious extremists push the nation to the brink. When religion blinds and people are unable to see or think clearly, when fear and fanaticism loom very large, Soyinka is a voice of rational sanity, thoughtful courage, and moderation."

"Chinua Achebe was a real education for me, a real education. And certainly the plays of Soyinka and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born of Ayi Kwei Armah-those things were at that time real, and they're the kinds of books that one can re-read with enormous discoveries subsequently."

"He is remembered in Nigeria with awe, both for a political boldness that landed him in prison and for a commanding intellect that is manifest in every genre he tackles."

"I consider The Road a masterpiece."

"The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place."

"For an African writing in English is not without its serious setbacks. He often finds himself describing situations or modes of thought which have no direct equivalent in the English way of life. Caught in that situation he can do one of two things. He can try and contain what he wants to say within the limits of conventional English or he can try to push back those limits to accommodate his ideas … I submit that those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of English so as to accommodate African thought-patterns must do it through their mastery of English and not out of innocence."

"found a girl who will suit [him] admirably"

"it is impossible for [him] to marry Nweke’s daughter"

"deeply affected by his father’s grief"

"the first rain in the year"

"calls for medicine"

"that women supply with success to recapture their husbands’ straying affection"

"obstinately ahead of his more superstitious neighbors in these matters"

"In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city it had always seemed to her something of a joke that a person’s tribe could determine who he married."

"‘I can’t—we must—I mean it is impossible for me to marry Nweke’s daughter.’ ‘Impossible. Why?’ asked his father. ‘I don’t love her.’ ‘Nobody said you did. Why should you?’"

"What one looks for in a wife are a good character and a Christian background."

"Yes. They are most unhappy if the engagement is not arranged by them. In our case it’s worse—you are not even an Ibo.This was said so seriously and so bluntly that Nene could not find speech immediately. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city it had always seemed to her something of a joke that a person’s tribe could determine whom he married."

"As Nnaemeka walked home that evening he turned over in his mind the different ways of overcoming his father’s opposition, especially now that he had gone and found a girl for him. He had thought of showing his letter to Nene but decided on second thoughts not to, at least for the moment."

"“I don’t love her."“Nobody said you did. Why should you?” he asked.“Marriage today is different…”“Look here, my son,” interrupted his father, “nothing is different. What one looks for in a wife are a good character and a Christian background.”Nnaemeka saw there was no hope along the present line of argument."

"Nene Atang from Calabar. She is the only girl I can marry.” This was a very rash reply and Nnaemeka expected the storm to burst. But it did not. His father merely walked away into his room. This was most unexpected and perplexed Nnaemeka. His father’s silence was infinitely more menacing than a flood of threatening speech. That night the old man did not eat."

"Nnaemeka, for his own part, was very deeply affected by his father’s grief. But he kept hoping that it would pass away. If it had occurred to him that never in the history of his people had a man married a woman who spoke a different tongue, he might have been less optimistic."

"The story eventually got to the little village in the heart of the Ibo country that Nnaemeka and his young wife were a most happy couple. But his father was one of the few people who knew nothing about this. He always displayed so much temper whenever his son’s name was mentioned that everyone avoided it in his presence. By a tremendous effort of will he had succeeded in pushing his son to the back of his mind. The strain had nearly killed him but he had persevered, and won."

"Okeke was trying hard not to think of his two grandsons. But he knew he was now fighting a losing battle. He tried to hum a favourite hymn but the pattering of large rain drops on the roof broke up the tune. His mind immediately returned to the children. How could he shut his door against them? By a curious mental process he imagined them standing, sad and forsaken, under the harsh angry weather—shut out from his house. That night he hardly slept, from remorse—and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them."

"Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."

"When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk."

"We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break."

"A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone."

"The Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly, so his chi agreed. And not only his chi but his clan too, because it judged a man by the work of his hands."

"But he was not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error. And so people said he had no respect for the gods of the clan. His enemies said that his good fortune had gone to his head."

"Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health."

"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."

"When did you become a shivering old woman," Okonkwo asked himself, "you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed."

"You sound as if you question the authority and the decision of the Oracle, who said he should die." "I do not. Why should I? But the Oracle did not ask me to carry out its decision." [...] "The Earth cannot punish me for obeying her mesenger," Okonkwo said. "A child's fingers are not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm."

"After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation--a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them."

"And when, as on that day, nine of the greatest masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle. Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these things they kept them to themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan."

"Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!"

"The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors."

"If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others."

"It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age."

"We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true." [said Obierika] "There is no story that is not true," said Uchendu. "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?"

"Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up."

""Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory." [...] They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song."

"Okonkwo was popularly called the "Roaring Flame." As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? [...] He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smoldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo's eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply."

"The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

"As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him."

"Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: "Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.""

"Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life."

"In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. [...] One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate."

"A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle."

"Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden."

"You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree — the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men."

"If one finger brings oil it soils the others."

"A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it."

"When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun."

"Although he was still only a child it looked as though the deity had already marked him out as his future Chief. Even before he had learnt to speak more than a few words he had been strongly drawn to the god’s ritual."

"When a handshake goes beyond the elbow we know it has turned to another thing."

"We have no quarrel with Ulu. He is still our protector, even though we no longer fear Abam warriors at night. But I will not see with these eyes of mine his priest making himself lord over us. My father told me many things, but he did not tell me that Ezeulu was king in Umuaro. Who is he, anyway? Does anybody here enter his compound through the man’s gate? If Umuaro decided to have a king we know where he would come from. Since when did Umuachala become head of the six villages? We all know that it was jealousy among the big villages that made them give the priesthood to the weakest. We shall fight for our farmland and for the contempt Okperi has poured on us. Let us not listen to anyone trying to frighten us with the name of Ulu. If a man says yes his chi also says yes: And we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them. Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbors and set fire on him? I salute you"

"I have traveled in Olu and I have traveled in Igbo, and I can tell you there is no escape from the white man. He has come. When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that. Before any of you here was old enough to tie the cloth between the legs I saw with my own eyes what the white man did to Abame. Then I knew there was no escape. As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man drive away all our customs. I know that as I say it now it passes by your ears, but it will happen. The white man has power which comes from the true God and it burns like fire. This is the God about Whom we preach every eighth day."

"A man does not speak a lie to his son,” he said. “Remember that always. To say My father told me is to swear the greatest oath"

"The man was a complete nonentity until we crowned him, and now he carries on as though he had been nothing else all his life. It’s the same with Court Clerks and even messengers. They all manage to turn themselves into little tyrants over their own people. It seems to be a trait in the character of the negro"

"a man should hold his compound together, not plant dissension among his children"

"The man who brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit"

"He looked as bright as a new shilling in his immaculate white robes."

"We had all accepted things from white skins that none of us would have brooked from our own people."

"A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday."

"In Chief Nanga’s company it was impossible not to be merry."

"What mattered was that a man had treated me as no man had a right to treat another—not even if he was master and the other slave; and my manhood requires that I made him pay for his insult in full measure."

"That’s all they cared for,’ [Max] said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?"

"At first Onitsha looked very strange to Chike. He could not say who was a thief or kidnapper and who was not. In Umuofia every thief was known, but here even people who lived under the same roof were strangers to one another."

"After the incident of the leopard skin Chike lost some of his eagerness for crossing the Niger. He did not see how he could obtain one shilling without stealing or begging."

"The largest sum of money he had ever had at one time was threepence."

"Then the stranger went away and Mr. Nwaba retired to his room. Chike did not give much thought to the incident at the time. But he was to remember it later."

"In his joy, he said again, ‘Thank you, sir.’ The man did not reply; he was talking to his friend again, with a cigarette in his mouth."

"So Chike’s adventure on the River Niger brought him close to danger and then rewarded him with good fortune. It also exposed Mr. Peter Nwaba, the rich but miserly trader. For it was he who had led the other thieves."

"Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil."

"By immediately identifying his people as “men of soul” ."

"Measure out / [their] joys and agonies / too, our long, long passion week / in paces of the dance”"

"A dead end nor total loss."

"Lying in wait for the people’s land and resources."

"He calls the ground where men return in death a place of “safety” and “strength” ."

"He warns them not to become “disinherited”."

"Lame foot in the air."

"They led and he followed blindly, his heavy chest heaving up and down in silent weeping ... it was the worst kind of madness, deep and tongue-tied."

"We did not ask him for money yesterday; we shall not ask him tomorrow. But today is our day; we have climbed the iroko tree and would be foolish not to take down all the firewood we need."

"I don't believe anybody will be so unlike other people that they will be unhappy when their sons are engaged to marry."

"People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."

"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool."

"War is war. The strong will always crush the weak. The only difference is that in the process some have made a lot of money and others a lot of misery."

"In his mind, he could see the ravages of war: destruction, suffering, hunger, and the grotesque faces of men turned beasts by the bitterness of combat."

"A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril."

"The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art."

"It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know."

"The earth seemed unearthly."

"Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth."

"We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet."

"A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days."

"The total life of man is reflected in his art. And so when people come to us and say, "Why are you... you artist so political?" I don't know what they are talking about. Because art is political. And further more I'd say this, that those who tell you "Do not put too much politics in your art," are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is. And what they are saying is not don't introduce politics. What they are saying is don't upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It's only that they are on the other side. Now in my enthusiasm, art cannot be on the side of the oppressor."

"What art tries to do is domesticate whatever is around and press it into the service of man. Morality is basic to the nature of art."

"we are not gladiators. But there is something we are committed to of fundamental importance, something everybody should be committed to. We are committed to the process of changing our position in the world. This is what our literature is about. There is a certain position assigned to me in the world, assigned to him [Baldwin] in the world, and we are saying we are not satisfied with that position. This is important to me-to everybody. I think you see it is important to me. You may not see that it is important to you but it is. We want to create the new man. Mankind tries all kinds of ways, all kinds of solutions; some of them leading that far and no farther and it is wise that we try something else. We have followed your way and it seems there is a little problem at this point. And so we are offering a new aesthetic. There is nothing wrong with that...Picasso did that. In 1904 he saw that Western art had run out of breath so he went to the Congo-the dispised Congo-and brought out a new art. Don't mind what he was saying before he died: that much is entirely his business. But he borrowed something which saved his art. And we are telling you what we think will save your art. We think we are right, but even if we are wrong it doesn't matter. It couldn't be worse than it is now."

"Well there is an assumption there that Conrad's...Heart of Darkness is great art and I don't accept that. Great art flourishes on problems or anguish or prejudice. But the role of the writer must be very clear. The writer must not be on the side of oppression. In other words there must be no confusion. I write about prejudice; I write about wickedness; I write about murder, I write about rape: but I must not be caught on the side of murder or rape. It is as simple as that."

"A number of very young people in Kenya have adopted the Marxist analysis of society. And I cannot quarrel with that. But I can't help feeling at the same time... that my own aesthetic definition, which I gave earlier on, would be a little uneasy about the narrowing of things to a point where we no longer accept the truth of the Ibo proverb that "Where something stands, something else will stand beside it," and that we become like the people we are talking about the single-mindedness which leads to totalitarianism of all kinds, to fanaticism of all kinds. And I can't help the feeling that somehow at the base, art and fanaticism are not loggerheads. And so I don't dismiss the Marxist interpretation. I think it is valid in its way. But when somebody says "I am the way, the truth, and the light.... "Now my own religion, the religion of my people says something else. It says, "You may worship one god to perfection and another god will kill you." Wherever something is, something else also is. And I think it is important that whatever the regimes are saying that the artist keeps himself ready to enter the other plea. Perhaps it's not tidy perhaps we are contradicting ourselves. But one of your poets has said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well.""

"[W]hatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism. (p. 154)"

"The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper!"

"Don't disparage the day that still has an hour of light in its hand."

"As the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth-living."

"My people have a saying which my father often used. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof."

"Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not available to the rest of us. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strength."

"That we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking."

"I wouldn't put myself under the democratic dictatorship even of angels and archangels."

"Do your people have a proverb about a man looking for something inside the bag of a man looking for something?"

"Aha! Come to think of it, that might explain the insistence of the oppressed that the oppressor must not be allowed to camouflage his appearance or confuse the poor by stealing and masquerading in their clothes. Perhaps it is the demand of that primitive integrity of the earth... Or, who knows, it might also be something less innocent (for the earth does have its streak of peasant cunning) - an insistence that your badge of privilege must never leave your breast, nor your coat of many colours your back... so that... on the wrathful day of reckoning... you will be as conspicuous as a peacock!"

"In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything."

"In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them."

"The Igbo people of Southern Nigeria are more than ten million strong and must be accounted one of the major peoples of Africa. Conventional practice would call them a tribe, but I no longer follow that convention. I call them a nation"

"The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near."

"The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way."

"It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity."

"We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: "He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down."

"...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly."

"Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa."

"I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety."

"Paradoxically, a saint like [Albert] Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother."

"The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us."

"It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor."

"Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound."

"There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless."

"People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience."

"Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform."

"Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world."

"The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations."

"There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed."

"Camara Laye’s The Dark Child and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because they gave me a glorious shock of recognition. Until I read them, I was not consciously aware that people who looked like me could exist in books. I grew up in a Nigerian university town, and all the books I read before then were foreign children’s books with white characters doing unfamiliar things."

"I do reread novels I love, like Chinua Achebe’s “Arrow of God,” to remind myself of what fiction can do."

"When I read Things Fall Apart which is about an Ibo tribe in Nigeria, a tribe I never saw, a system-to put it that way or a society, the rules of which were a mystery to me, I recognized everybody in it. And that book was about my father. How we got over I don't know, we did!""

"Achebe is a great writer. He is the father of our English literature. You can't take that away from him. His work is highly original. When I was doing my degree here, I used Arrow of God, which I think is his best work. But the critics seem to think everything should be like Things Fall Apart. Everytime you want to read Achebe, you feel you want to study it as literature. You don't pick it up as though you want to enjoy the literature. That is why for a very, very long time, if you went to the African Writers Series, you had the feeling that this is not for the common people."

"I rank Achebe very highly, especially his Arrow of God, and I consider it a tragedy that he has had to live under such disturbed conditions and writes so little."

"He has begun to resuscitate and reinstate the past, the precolonial era. I'm thinking of Arrow of God, which to my mind is perhaps the best novel to come out of Africa. I think it is an absolutely wonderful novel. And if you look at that novel, it really has almost nothing to do with the impact of the white man. It is about black life, black civilization, before the period of conquest. The period of conquest is just on the horizon, so to speak. But there are not many people who have tackled that kind of theme. There are not many black writers who have done it yet."

"Chinua Achebe was a real education for me, a real education."

""This is the kola nut. This seed is a star. This star is life. This star is us"."

""Elvis! Elvis! Wake up. It’s past six in de morning and all your mates are out dere looking for work,” his father, Sunday, said. “What work, sir? I have a job.” “Dancing is no job. We all dance in de bar on Saturday. Open dis bloody door!” Sunday shouted."

"He stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent yet beautiful at the same time? he wondered. He hadn’t known about the poverty and violence of Lagos until he arrived. It was as if people conspired with the city to weave a web of silence around its unsavoury parts."

"What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me."

"He said to me, "It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak. Just know it is enough sometimes to know it is difficult.""

"We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?"

"Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation."

"Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression-how long before the pot boiled over."

"There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp."

"He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present."

"Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time."

"“blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were—those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse."

"Do you think anything ever changes, Salazar asked. That we can make a difference? That we will become a better species? I don’t know, I’m not sure if it even matters. I think all that matters is that we don’t shrink away from the truth and that we keep trying, Sunil said. I like that. Push the stone up the fucking hill because we should. Yes,"

"The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations."

"My father tells a story about his father dying in a refugee camp. His father was a titled man in Igboland, which meant that he was a great man. He had one of the highest titles a man could have. But his hometown fell, so he had to leave and go to a refugee camp, and he died and he was buried in a mass grave. Which is just heartbreaking for a man, particularly a man like him. My father, who's the first son, and who takes his responsibilities very seriously, couldn't go to bury his father because the roads were occupied. He was in a different part of Biafra and so it took a year until ... he could go to the refugee camp. ... And he goes there and he says, 'I want to know where my father was buried.' And somebody waved very vaguely and said, 'Oh we buried the people there.' So it was a mass grave. So many people had died. And my father says he went there and he took a handful of sand, and he said he's kept the sand ever since. For me, that was one of the most moving things I had ever heard.""

"No matter who we are, we dream."

"In Nigeria I'm not black ... We don't do race in Nigeria. We do ethnicity a lot, but not race. My friends here don't really get it. Some of them sound like white Southerners from 1940. They say, "Why are black people complaining about race? Racism doesn't exist!' It's just not a part of their existence.""

"I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare ... It’s that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I’m close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for."

"I don’t think I’m more inherently likely to do domestic work, or childcare ... It doesn’t come pre-programmed in your vagina, right?"

"Because we write fiction we mine our souls. Of course you put yourself into your fiction, your fiction is you."

"This is the kind of capitalism I hate. This is bullying capitalism. Look, I am Igbo, I come from a trading culture. My people are merchant and I'm all for buying and selling. But capitalism has to be a fair exchange."

"Feminism is not that men and women are the same. If men and women are the same, we won't have sexism. We are just stating the differences and people should stop giving negative value to all the attributes that women have. It's not that men and women are the same but they've equally human."

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men."

"I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there."

"The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable."

"Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture."

"There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) Tash Aw, Niq Mhlongo, Rachel Seiffert, Mary Gaitskill, David Szalay, Leila Aboulela, Dave Eggers, Tracy K. Smith, Tessa Hadley, Richard Flanagan, Claire Messud, James Lasdun, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vivian Gornick, the late Bharati Mukherjee, Deborah Levy, John Gregory Brown, Amit Chaudhuri, Nawal El Saadawi, Margo Jefferson, Jesmyn Ward, Lynn Nottage, Janet Malcolm, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker, Peter Orner, Susan Orlean."

"Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing."

"Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice."

"When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.""

"If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion."

"I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance."

"They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge."

"She liked that [Obinze] wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. 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."

"She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself."

"With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it was her right size. She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not, how she worried that she should know what she wanted to do with her life but did not even know what she wanted to study at university. It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her."

"Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right."

"I cannot control even the dreams that I have made."

"People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival."

"The white missionaries brought us their god,” Amaka was saying. “Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to them, shouldn’t we at least repackage it?"

"Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene."

"There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair."

"Things started to fall apart when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère."

"I meant to say I am sorry that Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.’"

"( Page 10)"

"Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet.’"

"It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewande. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently."

"( Page 58)"

"I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about the ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire."

"I thought the Igwe was supposed to stay at his place and receive guests. I didn’t know he visits people’s homes,’ Amaka said, as we went downstairs. ‘I guess that’s because your father is a Big Man.’"

"( Page 93)"

"When she made a U-turn and went back the way we had come, I let my mind drift, imagining God laying out the hills of Nsukka with his wide white hands, crescent-moon shadows underneath his nails just like Father Benedict’s."

"(Page 131)"

"Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.’"

"This cannot go on, nwunye m,’ Aunty Ifeoma said. ‘When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.’"

"(Page 213)"

"Rain splashed across the floor of the veranda, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide."

"(Page 217)"

"She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, ‘God take power from the devil.’ I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free."

"( Page 238)"

"That night when I bathed, with a bucket half full of rainwater, I did not scrub my left hand, the hand that Father Amadi had held gently to slide the flower off my finger. I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky. I sang as I bathed. There were more earthworms in the bathtub, and I left them alone, watching the water carry them and send them down the drain."

"(Page 269-270)"

"Kambili is right,’ she said. ‘Something from God was happening there.’"

"(Page 275)"

"Of course God does. Look at what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own Son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t he just go ahead and save us?'"

"(Page 289)"

"We will take Jaja to Nsukka first, and then we’ll go to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma,’ I said. ‘We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers.’ I am laughing. I reach out and place my arm around Mama’s shoulder and she leans toward me and smiles."

"(Page 306-307)"

"Things started to fall apart at home.”"

"A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved […] The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue.”"

"Jaja’s defiance seems like Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”"

"Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him."

"This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles"

"Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?"

"...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came."

"The truth has become an insult."

"This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see."

"There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable."

"A gorgeous pitless account of love, violence and betrayal."

"Greatness depends on where you are coming from."

"I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key"

"A successful story for me exist in a moral universe, not one where goodness always triumph, because that would be false but one with an inherent awareness of goodness"

""My own definition is a feminist is a man or woman who says 'yes,there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it,we must do better.All of us,women and men,must do better." chimamanda quote based on gender."

""Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”"

"“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”"

"“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”"

"“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”"

"So true--when people see an absence of women in engineering, science and technology, then it becomes self-reinforcing."

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

"Many stories matter. Stories that have been used to dispossess and to malign.But stories can also be used to empower,and to humanize.Stories can break the dignity of a people.But stories can also repair that broken dignity"

"Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living."

"How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation. Which of your favourite quotes by Chimamanda did we miss?"

"There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich."

"Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don’t teach boys to do the same?"

"Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage."

"Of course I am not worried about intimating men. The type of man who will be intimidated is exactly the type of man I have no interest in."

"Please love by giving and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take."

"trans women are trans women"

"And even though I helped to clean the wounded, I had never taken anyone into my room.But I took this girl into my room.Her name was chinasa."

"You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don’t wear makeup, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t use deodorant."

"I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else."

"We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."

"The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too."

"It was something like pain and different from pain."

"Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman..."

"If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man."

"I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold"

"You can’t nice your way to being loved."

"Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time."

"How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind."

"The frequent flare of sad longing."

"I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone."

"Tears were so cheap now"

"Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:"

"They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done."

"Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation."

"He would kill you, but he would do it slowly"

"I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces."

""I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously."

"I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace."

"Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man"

"Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing"

"It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be."

"Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold."

"When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain."

"sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason."

"my dark day further darkened."

"for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life"

"was suspended in a place of no feeling,"

"The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy"

"What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?"

"What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all."

"He rolled his eyes in a kind of disbelieving amusement. “What, the single friend will seduce the husband, or the single friend will make the wife want to be single again?"

"I made myself boneless and amenable. I spent weekends willing the landline next to my bed to ring. Often it didn’t. Then he would call, before midnight, to ask if I was still up, so he could visit and leave before dawn."

"Each morning, I coated concealer on the dark bags under my eyes. Most days, I caressed a bottle of Advil, longing for the translucent green pills, but knowing that I would never take them."

"I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?"

"I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true."

"I began to cry. Tears were so cheap now. How do some memories insist on themselves?"

"Ours was an ancient story, the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist."

"I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt. It was not transcendental. There was a festering red pain between my legs. Somewhere in my consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and I had pushed out the baby. So animalistic, so violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the doctor urging me, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone."

"We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference."

"Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"We mostly spoke English; Igbo was for mimicking relatives and for saying painful things."

"He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him"

"Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing."

"He said, “I thought you let me because you had protection.” I said, “What are you talking about? You know I stopped taking the pill because it made me fat, and I assumed you knew what it meant, what it could mean.” He said, “There was miscommunication."

"In my head, there was a queue of emotions I could not name, wanting to be tried out one after the other."

"A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear."

"Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife."

"was to remember like a brief blur my life as it once was, when I was only a daughter, not a mother."

"My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things."

"I felt light from relief, weightless, unburdened."

"How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life."

"Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind just cannot."

"And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved."

"Her silence bruised the air between us."

"A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment."

"Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language."

"I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present."

"For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there."

"How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?"

"It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed."

"Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved."

"“I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being.”"

"“Women in general are more likely to have richer interior lives and are also socialized to just sort of embrace more complexity emotionally.”"

"“Writing fiction is the love of my life. It's the thing that I think gives me meaning.”"

"“I’ve always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind. ... No, no, no. I said what I believe.”"

"“Social media has reshaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest.”"

"“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more.”"

"“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”"

"“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”"

"“I feel that I have been fortunate to have found success, and I also want the young writers to have what I did not have when I was starting out my writing career … Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum; we talk about politics, everything.”"

"“Feminism for me is about justice; it’s about the idea that all human beings are equal… Feminism just means equality of opportunity.”"

"“I am not apologetic for being a Nigerian. I won’t apologise for it; it’s who and what I am.”"

"(Whose writing today most inspires you?) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work — both fiction and nonfiction..."

"Writing for me is an act of discovery, I am learning about the characters even as I am writing them. In reality, we rarely know why people do the things they do. I think it is enough, sometimes, to simply point to something and allow the readers to reach their own conclusions."

"As an individual I’m attracted to strong female characters – my characters have always been people who own themselves. Even if they’re strongly doing something wrong, they’ve always been powerful people."

"We have a wide divide between classes and we have a wide divide between cultures because we’re from different tribes, we have different religions. You don’t have to walk very far to see someone who has a really different life from you...I wouldn’t want to write a novel and people feel that I’m speaking to a Nigerian experience – I’m speaking to my experience, to the things I’m interested in, and that’s all I can do."

"Here in Nigeria, being the first born is a huge, huge role. It's a huge responsibility. It's a big deal. You're treated - from the get-go, you're treated differently. You know, there's a kind of proverb here. I'm not sure what language it's in, but where they say, the eldest child is the one that opened the womb."

"It’s because she is beautiful, you know. That’s all it is. They don’t really care about the rest of it. She gets a pass at life."

"I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass."

"It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don’t want to leave any evidence of foul play."

"She does not cry for me,” he says, his voice hardening. “She cries for her lost youth, her missed opportunities and her limited options. She does not cry for me, she cries for herself."

"Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?"

"That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry."

"We are nothing if not thorough in our deception of others."

"There is music blasting from Ayoola's room, she's listening to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lorde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms."

"Love is not a weed, It cannot grow where it please…"

"“For the average male, this wouldn’t be all that peculiar—but this man was meticulous. His bookshelf was arranged alphabetically by author. His bathroom was stocked with the full range of cleaning supplies; he even bought the same brand of disinfectant as I did. And his kitchen shone. Ayoola seemed out of place here—a blight in an otherwise pure existence.”"

"(Chapter 5, Pages 7-9)"

"Ayoola is draped across my bed in her pink lace bra and black lace thong. She is incapable of practical underwear. Her leg is dangling off one end, her arm dangling off the other. Hers is the body of a music video vixen, a scarlet woman, a succubus. It belies her angelic face.”"

"(Chapter 8, Page 19)"

"I've always wanted to write something that will show the world that prior to the coming of the British to Nigeria, we had some kind of complex systems. I feel like there hasn't been an African version of, say, Milton's "Paradise Lost" which actually explored the very foundational principle of Western civilization, which would be the free will. Or even Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." So I wanted to write something cosmological, and the chi has been very fascinating to me. It was very difficult, it entailed a lot of research, even down to actually going to shrines and interviewing the last adherents of Odinani, the Igbo religion, now that most Africans are converts to either Christianity or Islam…"

"I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes…The great mother, or the great father, for example. And you work your way from that, slowly, to more complexity. The idea of this guy who wants to be with the woman he loves – you can say the same of the movie Gladiator, for instance. If you strip everything down to the basics, it’s just about Maximus wanting to go back to his wife and every other thing stopping him. Even Homer’s Odyssey; he just wants to go back and the entire universe is conspiring against that ambition."

"There are some rhetorical moves that I wouldn’t be able to make if I didn’t know these languages. In terms of writing figurative language, I probably pull a lot from Yoruba imagery…"

"People always ask me, why do your stories end this way? And honestly…I want to write a feelgood story. But I think that because I’m fascinated with the metaphysics of existence, I keep thinking why, of all the people who came to Cyprus, was it Jay who died? Or, I read not too long ago of a nine-year-old doing her homework and there’s a drive-by shooting and a bullet comes in through the roof and kills her. She didn’t do anything to deserve that fate. When you think about these things, and you want to write fiction around that, the path it takes you to can feel inevitable and tragic."

"Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person's skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one's spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them."

"Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm."

"I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what become permanent can be indestructible. The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother."

"Do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome"

"Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget."

"That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me."

"I'd heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance - even if faint - to their beginnings"

"I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it."

"M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description,"

"We did it. We avenged them"

"Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known."

"They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail."

"Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay."

"The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own."

"For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less."

"Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?”"

"All the peace that had returned after his father finished mourning his wife for many years vanished at once. Grief returned like an army of old ants crawling into familiar holes in the soft earth of his father’s life....."

"Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief."

"in Umuahia, a town in the land of the great fathers..."

"You’re a beautiful man."

"People say you’ve got to write honestly and that sounds great but also, what does that mean? I think part of that is knowing there are some things black people go through that are universal and those things are how the world shapes you…if you’re in a racist encounter, they’re not going to say, “Oh, you’re Jamaican, oh, you’re Nigerian; oh, you’re full African American; your ancestors were brought here on slave ships.” That’s not what other people see. In the outside world, we have a kind of universal experience but it also changes depending on whether you’ve grown up in predominantly white spaces or predominantly black spaces…"

"The thing is that underneath we are all humans…Everyone has people they love and people they want to protect, everyone has things they are afraid of or that cause them pain."

"I saw the opportunity to show the beauty in the culture and show that these words sound magical. We’re so used to using Latin, but if J.K. Rowling saw magic in that, you can see magic in your own culture. And if you can see it, you can help other people to see it."

"…I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) For novelists, I’m a forever-fan of Sabaa Tahir. Her debut fantasy — “An Ember in the Ashes” — was the epic tale that inspired me to write “Children of Blood and Bone.” It moved me in ways a story hadn’t moved me before and gave me a chance to imagine a fantasy world with characters I’d never gotten to see before. For journalists, Shaun King. The work Shaun does for the black community is incredible. I respect his strength, tenacity and passion, and I admire him deeply for the commitment to getting our stories out."

"When I read, I like to go somewhere else in my mind with stories that touch our real world without taking place in it."

"(What makes for a good fantasy novel?) I think the most magical fantasies will always be the ones with a world you want to live in forever…I think great worlds are important because they allow readers to play in that world with their imagination long after the book is done, but a great world isn’t complete without a great protagonist."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Acts of love. Be it familial, friendly or romantic. A beautifully described, tender act of love destroys me…I’ve always loved sweeping romances and magical fantasies. I’ve loved headstrong, determined female protagonists and epic battles. I still like to read the same things. I think the difference now is that I get to read all the things I like with characters who look like me. My childhood stories didn’t give me that. Even in the stories I wrote myself, I was only writing white characters and biracial characters. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that erasure was painful and damaging to my sense of self. So getting to create and read stories that fight that erasure and build on my sense of self is the only significant change in my reading tastes."

"You have your duty and your heart. To chose one means the other must suffer."

"Love is too strong, too intense, for what I feel. For what I am allowed to feel."

"Power is not the answer. It will only intensify the fight."

"No matter how much I crave peace, the gods have other plans."

"“Everyone else feels like being caught in the rain. You’re the whole tsunami."

"I begin to realise how far others will go to keep us down."

"I don't know what shocks me more--- the power in my voice or the words themselves"

"Reality and logic don’t matter to her. She needs this so badly, failure isn’t even in the realm of possibilities."

"I’ve been a sheep. A sheep when my kingdom needed me to act like a king."

"It doesn't matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields. They will always hate me in this world."

"It avoids rather than hurts, it hurts rather than maims, it maims rather than kills—the staff does not destroy.” “I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war. I give you the strength to fight, but you all must learn the strength of restraint.” Mama turns to me, shoulders pinned back. “You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. That is the way of the staff."

"Fool yourself all you want, little prince, but don’t feign innocence with me. I won’t let your father get away with what he’s done. I won’t let your ignorance silence my pain."

"Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw the maji of Ibadan in chains. The gods died with our magic."

"(Chapter One)"

"He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy’s rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate"

"(Chapter Two )"

"You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. Mama Agba’s words from this morning seep into my head."

"(Chapter Five )"

"Yemi meets my eyes with a hatred that impales me like a sword. Though her mouth never opens, her voice rings in my skull. “Safe ended a long time ago.”"

"(Chapter Eleven)"

"I arch my eyebrow at Amari and think back to her mention of a training accident. I assumed the scar came from her brother’s sword, but was she holding a sword, too? Despite her escape from Lagos, I can’t imagine the princess locked in battle."

"(Chapter Thirteen)"

"Though the royal seal is etched into the clay wall, it waves in my mind like the velvet banners in Father’s throne room. After the Raid, he abolished the old seal, a gallant bull-horned lionare that always used to make me feel safe. Instead, he proclaimed that our power would be represented by the snow leopanaires: ryders who were ruthless. Pure."

"(Chapter Twenty-Two)"

"Growing up, Father led me to believe that those who clung to the myth of the gods were weak. They relied on beings they could never see, dedicating their lives to faceless entities."

"(Chapter Twenty-Four )"

"After I perform the ritual and bring magic back, after Baba is safe and sound. I’ll rally a group of Grounders to sink this monstrosity into the sand. That announcer will pay for every wasted divîner life. Every noble will answer for their crimes."

"(Chapter Twenty-Five )"

"I don’t know what disturbs me more: that I killed him, or that I could do it again. Strike, Amari. A thin whisper of father’s voice plays in my ears."

"(Chapter Thirty-Four)"

"Those are Father’s words, Inan. His decisions. Not yours. We are our own people. We make our own choices.”"

"(Chapter Thirty-Six )"

"Zélie’s memories don’t hold the villains Father always warned of. Only families he tore apart. Duty before self. His creed rings through my ears. My father. Her king. The harbinger of all this suffering."

"(Chapter Thirty-Nine)"

"This pawn was the only piece I managed to salvage. Shame ripples through me as I stare at the tarnished metal. The only gift he’s ever given me, and at its core is hate."

"(Chapter Forty-Seven)"

"Zu’s tears make my own eyes prickle. Kwame’s face pinches with pain. I want to hate him for what he did to Tzain, but I can’t. I’m no better. If anything, I’m worse. If Inan hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve stabbed that masked divîner to death just to get answers"

"(Chapter Fifty-One)"

"A pit of guilt opens in my chest, tainted with the smell of burning flesh. The fires I watched from the royal palace resurface, the innocent lives burned before my young eyes. A memory I’ve pushed down like my magic, a day I longed to forget. But staring at Zélie now brings it all back: the pain. The tears. The death."

"(Chapter Fifty-Four)"

"The children of Orïsha dance like there’s no tomorrow, each step praising the gods. Their mouths glorify the rapture of liberation, their hearts sing the Yoruba songs of freedom. My ears dance at the words of my language, words I once thought I’d never hear outside my head. They seem to light up the air with their delight. It’s like the whole world can breathe again."

"(Chapter Fifty-Six )"

"“I thought things could be different. I wanted them to be different. But after what we just saw, we have no choice. We can’t give people that kind of power.”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Three)"

"In that instant it hits me: Zulaikha’s death. Zélie’s screams. They don’t mean a thing to him. Because they’re maji, they’re nothing. He preaches duty before self, but his Orïsha doesn’t include them. It never has."

"(Chapter Sixty-Six )"

"Binta’s voice rings loud. The sight of her blood fills my head. I can avenge her now. I can cut Father down. While the maji take out the guards, my sword can free Father of his head. Retribution for all his massacres, every poor soul he ever killed […]."

"(Chapter Sixty-Eight )"

"The ache that cuts through me is sharper than the blade that cut through my back. It’s like losing Mama all over again."

"(Chapter Seventy-One)"

"I stare at the blade; the inscription gleams in the moonlight. Its words simplify my mission, creating space for my pain. A soldier. A great king. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. Duty over self. Orïsha over Zélie."

"(Chapter Seventy-Four )"

"I don’t want to be alone. Not when tonight could be my last night. Blind faith in the gods may have taken me this far, but if I’m going to get on that island tomorrow, I need more."

"(Chapter Seventy-Five)"

"Minutes stretch into hours, an eternity that drags like death. Each second that passes is another second my mind tumbles in guilt What if they’re captured? What if they die? I can’t have more people perish for this. I can’t have more blood stain my hands."

"(Chapter Seventy-Eight)"

"As I approach Inan, Baba’s shaking grows frantic. I can’t let him break my resolve. I don’t want them to win, Baba. But I can’t let you die."

"(Chapter Seventy-Nine )"

"As long as we don’t have magic, they will never treat us with respect, Baba’s spirit booms. They need to know we can hit them back. If they burn our homes—I burn theirs, too."

"(Chapter Eighty)"

"I cannot end it like this. If I do that, I’m no better than him. Orïsha will not survive by employing his tactics. Father must be taken down, but it is too much to drive my sword through his heart—Father pulls back his blade. Momentum carries me forward. Before I can pivot, Father swings his sword around and the blade rips across my back."

"(Chapter Eighty-Three)"

"Over generations, love of the maji turned into fear. Fear turned into hate. Hate transformed into violence, a desire to wipe the maji away.”"

"On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”"

"Magic slithers inside me. Venomous, like a thousand spiders crawling over my skin. It wants more of me.”"

"In death, the other spirits of the arena passed on their pain. Their hate. In their memories I felt the sting of the guards’ whips. I tasted the salt of fallen tears on my tongue. But Minoli brought me to the dirt fields of Minna, where she and her sharp-nosed siblings worked the land for autumn’s corn crop. Though the sun shone brutal and the work was hard, each moment passed with a smile, with song.”"

"It’s like seeing her for the first time: the human behind the maji. Fear embedded in the pain. Tragedy caused in Father’s name.”"

"Our lack of power and our oppression are one and the same, Inan. Without power we’re maggots. Without power the monarchy treats us like scum!”"

"For the first time since the torture, I feel a hint of the old fire that used to roar louder than my fear. But its flame is weak now; as soon as it flickers, it’s blown out by the wind.”"

"For years he forced Inan and me to trade blows and bruises under his watchful eye, never relenting, no matter how hard we cried. Every battle was a chance to correct his mistakes, to bring his first family back to life. If we got strong enough, no sword could take us down, no maji could burn our flesh. We fought for his approval, stuck in a battle for his love neither of us would ever win. We raised our swords against each other because neither of us had the courage to raise one against him.”"

"The moment magic breathes under my skin, I can’t find my voice. The purple light of my ashê glows around my hands, the divine power that fuels our sacred gifts. I haven’t felt its heat since the ritual that brought magic back to Orïsha. Since Baba’s spirit tore through my veins."

"“I can’t be expected to carry the plight of my people forever.”"

"(Chapter Two)"

"I tuck away my white streak, wishing I could just chop the lock from my hair. Tzain may not notice the way Zélie looks at it, but I always catch the snarl it brings to her face. For so long, she had to suffer because of her gift. Now those that hurt her the most wield that magic themselves."

"(Chapter Four)"

"But the return of magic and the birth of tîtáns are living proof that we are finally returning to the Orïsha the gods have always wanted for us! We’re so full of hatred and fear, we’ve forgotten what blessings these abilities are. For centuries these powers have been the source of our strife, but the gods ordained us with magic so the people of Orïsha could thrive!”"

"(Chapter Six)"

"For so long we’ve been defenseless against the havoc the maji wreak, but now the gods have blessed us as well. We’re powerful enough to annihilate them, Inan. The only way to achieve lasting peace is to cleanse the maggots from this land.”"

"(Chapter Twenty-Three)"

"Yoruba is sacred to our people. It’s not just something you can learn.”"

"Do you accept these people as your own?"

"These rebels burned your city to the ground. They wanted you and your people to starve. They are the poison of Orïsha! If you do not cut off the hand now, eventually you will be forced to sever the entire limb.”"

"(Chapter Twenty-Seven )"

"Even before Mother interrupted my rally, the support of the Orïshans didn’t touch the boundless joy of these maji. I wonder what it would be like to be embraced like that. To actually have a place where you belong."

"(Chapter Twenty-Eight )"

"If you’re going to be an elder, you need to understand that true magic isn’t about power,” I explain. “It’s something that’s a part of us, something that’s literally in our blood. Our people have suffered for this. Died for this. It’s not something you can just learn. You may have helped us get it back, but right now we’re still being hunted and killed for the very magic tîtáns like you use against us.”"

"(Chapter Thirty )"

"After the Raid, practicing these incantations was the only part of him I had left.”"

"Everyone, fill the bags with as many scrolls as you can. Kenyon, burn the rest.”"

"(Chapter Thirty-Eight )"

"No!” I jerk up, wincing at the pain that shoots up my side. “This temple may be the oldest Orïsha has. It holds the stories of our past!”"

"(Chapter Forty-Two )"

"My chest falls as Mother marches forward with her tîtáns that still stand. As she walks past the carnage in her path, I know she’s right. Our enemies are gaining ground. We need to eliminate every asset they have. But how long can both sides keep going like this before we destroy Orïsha?"

"I do not think you’ve gone far enough,” she says. “You speak of this war as if it is the start, but the maji and the monarchy have been fighting for decades. Centuries. Both sides have inflicted great pain on each other. Both sides are filled with mistrust.” [...] “You cannot blame Zélie for her actions any more than you can blame Inan for his past mistakes. You have to look beyond the surface if you truly want to achieve the peace you seek.”"

"(Chapter Forty-Five)"

"All these years I thought Father was a monster, but what if ruling this kingdom forced him to act that way?"

"(Chapter Fifty-Nine)"

"This war didn’t start when magic came back, Inan. You are only seeing the end of a battle countless have given their lives for. By winter’s dawn, we will have wiped the scourge of maji from this land. Even your wretched father couldn’t achieve that.”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Four)"

"No one ever asks, but you’re here. You’re here when so many people aren’t!” Roën grabs his head as if he could pull out his hair. “You survived the Raid. The guards. You survived the wrath of a king. You’re not a victim, Zélie. You’re a survivor! Stop running away!”"

"(Chapter Sixty-Nine)"

"I look back, not recognizing the monster that wears Ojore’s face. We did this to him. We poisoned him with all our hate."

"Even from afar, I see the blackened corpses that lie in the streets. Corpses that lie there because of me."

"(Chapter Seventy-Six)*Even from afar, I see the blackened corpses that lie in the streets. Corpses that lie there because of me."

"I feel the most sacred gift of Oya beneath my hands, the holy magic of life and death. When the last body breathes again, I stare at the glowing tattoos on my hands."

"(Chapter Eighty-One)"

"Strike, Amari."

"“I see the truth now. We pretend that magic is the root of our pain when everything rotten in this kingdom begins and ends with us. There’s no helping it.” I clench my fist. “Amari proved that in Ibadan. This throne corrupts even the purest of hearts. As long as it exists, people will continue to tear this kingdom apart.”"

"(Chapter Eighty-Five )"

"In all my novels… I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today."

"I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as a writer and also as an oral communicator."

"I work toward the liberation of women but I'm not a feminist. I'm just a woman."

"Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us."

"But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We, women, subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.”"

"Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience."

"Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World."

"The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it."

"I am a woman and a woman of Africa. I am a daughter of Nigeria and if she is in shame, I shall stay and mourn with her in shame."

"When has it ever been a virtue to be rich in wealth and poor in people?' The relatives nodded. They understood her very well- why have heaven an earth when you have no one to share it with?"

"1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category."

"Writers simply have to write, and not worry so much about what people think, because public opinion is such a difficult horse to ride."

"Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence and money is always short, bit with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head and those of my family, through God's grace, above water."

"Relatives watching wanted and expected me to break down and cry, thereby devaluing my inner sorrow."

"When people are not educated enough for the job market, it is like a time bomb ticking away which could explode in the streets."

"I thought at one time I would be thrown out. But I was not."

"An uneducated person has little chance of happiness."

"I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family."

"The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he's lost his life. That is unfair."

"God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage? she prayed desperately."

"In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name. She worries over them, looks after them when they are small; but in the actual help on the farm, the upholding of the family name, all belong to the father."

"God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage? ... when will I be free?"

"Nnu Ego was like those not-so well-informed Christians who,promised the Kingdom of Heaven,believed that it was literally just round the corner and that Jesus Christ was coming on the very morrow. Many of them would hardly contribute anything ton this world,reasoning, "What is the use? Christ will come soon" They became so insulated in their beliefs that not only would they have little to do with ordinary sinners,people going about their daily work, they even pitied them and in many cases looked down on them because the Kingdom of God was not for the likes of them. Maybe this was a protective mechanism devised to save them from realities too painful to accept."

"Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity."

"On her way back to their room, it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned by her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family; that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsability to actually enslave her. They knew that the traditional wife like herself would never dream of leaving her children.”"

"A man is never ugly."

"Don't blame anyone for what has happened to your father. Things have changed drastically since the days of his own youth,but he has refused to see the changes...The fact is that parents get only reflected glory from their children nowadays,whereas your father has invested in all of you, just as his father invested in him so that he could help on the farm. Your father forgot that he himself left the family farm to come to this place."

"Every woman should be free to live the life she chooses."

"The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, "After all, it's her life." However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her."

"Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves."

"I cannot live up to your standards."

"Some parents, especially those who have many children from different wives, may reject a bad son, a master may reject a wicked servant, a wife may go so far as to abandon a bad husband, but a mother can never, never reject her son. If he is convicted, she will be condemned alongside him."

"The more I think about it, the more I realize that we, women, set impossible models for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for each other. I can't live up to our role models, older wife. That’s why I need to create my own."

"At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept."

"The leaves were still on the trees but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off."

"Dreams soon assume substance"

"Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why then did they claim to be superior?"

"She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements."

"One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers?"

"Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me."

"She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost."

"The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins."

"Typical Igbo psychology; men never do wrong, only the women; they have to beg for forgiveness, because they are bought, paid for and must remain like that, silent, obedient slaves."

"She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks."

"You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”"

"(Francis, p. 39)"

"(Narrator, p. 53)"

"Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?"

"(Narrator, p. 166)"

"Her children were going to be different. They were all going to be black, they were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed."

"(Narrator, p. 141)"

"London, having killed Adah's congregational God, created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive."

"(Narrator, p. 151)"

"They were going to get the room they were asking for. Pa Noble was too old for Sue."

"(Narrator, p. 93)"

"Hunger drove Francis to work as a clerical officer in the post office. Adah's hopes rose. This might save the marriage after all."

"(Narrator, p. 162)"

"This old friend of Adah's paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband."

"(Narrator, p. 175)"

"Then the thought suddenly struck her. Yes, she would go to school."

"(Narrator, p. 9)"

"So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy."

"(Narrator, p. 42)"

"In Ibuza, every young man was entitled to his fun. The blame usually went to the girls. A girl who had had adventures before marriage was never respected in her new home; everyone in the village would know about her past, especially if she was unfortunate enough to be married to an egocentric man."

"There were men who would go about raping young virgins of thirteen and fourteen, and still expect the women they married to be as chaste as flower buds."

"Anything imported was considered to be much better than their own old ways."

"It is so even today in Nigeria: when you have lost your father, you have lost your parents. Your mother is only a woman, and women are supposed to be boneless. A fatherless family is a family without a head, a family without shelter, a family without parents, in fact a non-existing family. Such traditions do not change very much."

"Every woman, whether slave or free, must marry. All her life a woman always belonged to some male. At birth you were owned by your people, and when you were sold you belonged to a new master, when you grew up your new master who had paid something for you would control you."

"On each cheek was drawn the outline of a large spinach leaf looking ready to be picked. It was not that many Ibos would have put so many on the face of a little girl. But Ojebeta's mother Umeadi, when she realised that her daughter was going to live, had had reason for going to the expense of engaging the services of the most costly face-maker in Ibuza. For, with such a riot of tribal spinach marks on her only daughter's face, no kidnapper would dream of selling her into slavery. What was more, if she got lost her people would always know her."

"My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor."

"I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? He was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach…"

"When my grandmother applied for him for payment he said the estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with that money. I presume they will be handed down in the family, from generation to generation."

"But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of a mother’s agonies."

"For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like fire. O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up…"

"He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of…But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him … He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things."

"If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it."

"She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed."

"The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness."

"Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters. Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave…"

"I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched."

"But O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws…"

"You must forsake your sinful ways, and be faithful servants. Obey your old master and your young master…if you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master. You must obey God’s commandments."

"Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own."

"We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I was about to leave forever. On no other occasion has it ever been my lot to listen to so fervent a supplication for mercy and protection. It thrilled through my heart, and inspired me with trust in God."

"Yet that intelligent, enterprising, noble-hearted man was a chattel! Liable, by the laws of a country that calls itself civilized, to be sold with horses and pigs!"

"I replied, “God alone knows how much I have suffered; and He, I trust, will forgive me. If I am permitted to have my children, I intend to be a good mother, and to live in such a manner that people cannot treat me with contempt."

"I did not discover till years afterward that Mr. Thorne’s intemperance was not the only annoyance she suffered from…he had poured vile language into the ears of [Grandmother’s] innocent great-grandchild."

"I thought that if he was my own father, he ought to love me. I was a little girl then, and didn’t know any better. But now I never think any thing about my father. All my love is for you."

"Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage….The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own."

"And later he burnt the book and I think by that time this urge to write had become more important to me than he realized, and that was the day I said, ‘I’m going to leave this marriage’ and he said “What for, that stupid book?’ and I said, “I just feel you just burned my child."

"I write about the little happenings of everyday life . Being a woman and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called feminist."

"I think multiple realities exist. Most colonised countries had their cosmology, their ontology, their metaphysics colonised too. They’ve been told that what was there before wasn’t real. My dad’s a pretty conservative Christian, but he’ll still get a pastor to come to the hospital [where he works as a doctor] because someone’s been working black magic. I say to him: “If you don’t believe in it, why is the pastor there?” He says: “You don’t need to believe in something for it to be real.”"

"…I read literally everything I could get my hands on – the shampoo bottle, the cereal box. My mom didn’t let us have books at the table or we’d all have read. We didn’t always have electricity, so I read by candlelight. I read really fast too. My parents realised I’d run out of things to read and were like: “We need to buy you way more books.”"

"…The novel is autobiographical, so I used my life as a chronological skeleton for the story, which meant revisiting a lot of things that were immensely painful. It was also a process of discovery – I had no outline for Freshwater, no idea how it was going to take shape, but it built itself as I was writing it."

"…Whenever you write something biographical, everyone in your family doesn’t share the same memory. So your version of the story is not necessarily their version of the story, and part of the flexibility in having it fictionalized is that there’s not really a need to adhere to the strict facts. Because everything is colored by memory, especially when you’re pulling from childhood memories. There’s a little bit of wiggle room. This is my story of these events, as I remember it, as I experienced it…"

"…When I ask myself what beauty is in my eyes, the answer is that I would prefer not to have eyes. I would prefer not to have flesh, I would prefer to be dust, free of the whole thing altogether…"

"This was before Vivek, before the fire, before Chika would discover exactly how difficult it was to dig his own grave with the bones of his son.”"

"There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart.”"

"Osita wished, much later, that he’d told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull, made Osita hard with desire. ‘Take it off,’ he snapped instead, his throat rough. ‘Put it back before they catch us.’”"

"That morning, she was wearing an orange cotton dress; she looked like a burning sunset, and Chika knew immediately that his story would end with her, that he would drown in her large liquid eyes and it would be the perfect way to go."

"(chapter 2)"

"Meanwhile, Ala continued to watch her child. After all, the Ada was her hatchling, her bloodthirsty little sun, covered in translucent scales.”"

"(Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 45)"

"The main problem was that we were a distinct we instead of being fully and just her.”"

"(Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 18)"

"We bled a lot and Saul gave us the injection himself, but the Ada has no scar so perhaps this is a memory.”"

"(Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 22)"

"There shouldn’t be any monsters left in Lucille. The city used to have them, of course—what city didn’t? They used to be everywhere, thick in the air and offices, in the streets and in people’s own homes. They used to be the police and teachers and judges and even the mayor; yeah, the mayor used to be a monster.”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 9)"

"Bitter knew her name was heavy, but she hadn’t minded, because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam—that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest […] But Jam trusted her mother for those brutal truths, and that’s why home was the first place she brought the books with the angels in them.”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 14)"

"Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. ‘Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.’”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 18)"

"Angels aren't pretty pictures in old holy books, just like monsters aren't ugly pictures. It's all just people, doing hard things or doing bad things.”"

"(chapter 1)"

"As Jam watched, its fur softened and it shifted its stance just a little, draining the menace away. Well, little girl, it replied, I supposed you can call me Pet.”"

"Feyi had already decided who she wanted to be that night, so she stared right back at him, unabashed, drinking in his terra-cotta skin and dark copper beard.”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 2)"

"Feyi felt like a monster and a traitor, but it was fine, it had to happen.”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 5)"

"“I think we’re just figuring out how to survive a world on fire…that it’s okay to be alive.”"

"(Chapter 1, Page 6)"

"For a moment, there was the scream of tires and the mad chime of broken glass, the soft petals of white lilies, and a clod of dirt breaking apart in Feyi’s hand, but she brushed it all aside like smoke."

"The revolution needs artists, just like it needs healers and storytellers, just like it needs the organizers and protesters. It's all one big organism working together."

"(Chapter 5, Page 56)"

"He raised his head as Bitter emerged from the office, and his face broke into a huge smile. It made the blood rush to Bitter's face, how openly Aloe showed his pleasure at her presence. Sometimes she wondered how he found the courage to flash emotions as if no one could hurt him with them."

"(Chapter 4, Page 43)"

"You are allowed to feel safe, " Miss Virtue said. Bitter blinked, the tears heated her eyes because the words were so simple, yet so heavy with permission."

"(Chapter 4, Page 42)"

"...the world gotta burn before we can build a new one. We just got different ideas about what kinda fire we need."

"(Chapter 13, Page 138)"

"The foster parents had said that she would end up nowhere, then you could make up wherever you wanted to be, you could make it real. You could, for example, paint it into existence."

"(Chapter 7, Page 76)"

"Feminism is a laudable theory. I like how it raises our awareness of the discrimination against women, and I sanction the equality of men and women, girl and boy that it advocates."

"As salt is the taste to food so as a healthy communication is the taste to a loving and happy marriage."

"Selection of adequate and efficient methods of financing, in addition to organisational delivery structure for health services, is essential, if a country is set to achieve its national objective of providing health for all."

"It is well to dream... as long as we live, we shall continue to dream. But it is also important to remember that like babies dreams are conceived but not all dreams are born alive. Some are aborted. Others are stillborn."

"Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained?"

"If you want to be a good writer, write what you deeply feel you should write, not what you feel the audience will like."

"The hope that somewhere, somehow, someone may have benefitted from my ideas makes me feel I have made my little contribution to humanity. In addition to that, the national and international recognition is simply great"

"I would say that life demands that we do not give up, no matter how hard it looks. I have lived by the simple code contained in almost all religions, believe in God and do good works. (Remember God does not leave anybody behind)."

"Hard work runs through my blood. It does not kill, but laziness does. If I were to write about myself I would have hundreds of titles, maybe a title for every page."

"She knew education is the master key to opportunities for a better life. Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"My stories are triggered by drama of life."

"The general attitude of our society towards the female, commonly regarded as the “weaker” sex. I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"My inability to express myself well in spoken words. Perhaps this too may have been part of my training, not to be outspoken. I find spoken words unreliable, because once the words are out in the open, it is impossible to retrieve and edit them. I, therefore, discovered early in life, that writing is my best medium of self expression and a valuable tool of communication. This started with letter writing and graduated into fiction writing. In my days, letter writing was a beautiful form of communication. Courtship was elegantly done by the exchange of letters."

"Fiction writing, for me, is also triggered by the drama of life I witness on daily basis. I find human nature an interesting study. Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are intriguing and highly fascinating."

"I should mention also that besides all these, I was born into a long line of artists from my maternal side, musicians, dancers, drummers and story tellers. My major genre is prose fiction, (the novel), followed by short stories."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained? I believe strongly that apart from imparting knowledge to the reader, a writer should entertain the reader, because reading should be a joyous experience."

"In the mid-eighties, I was “discovered” by Prof. Stuart Brown, a Briton, and an English lecturer at the Bayero University, Kano. He had come across an excerpt of a story I was attempting to write. He was highly impressed by what he had read and quickly assured me that I was a writer in the making. Not only did he encourage me to write, he exposed my work to the international literary scene, and made it possible for the first edition of “The Stillborn” to be published by Longman Harlow U.K."

"I cannot, now, remember any particular book that had triggered the ‘muse’ in me, but I can remember some of my best novels; Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe, The River Between, by Ngugi wa Thiongo and Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal el Saadawi."

"The character of Ezeulu, the chief priest in Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe is one of my favourite characters."

"Writing is my key to self expression. It has been my life line. Not only have I found satisfaction, I have been able to grow intellectually and emotionally through the art of writing. The hope that someone, somewhere, and somehow may benefit from my work makes me feel I have made some contribution to humanity. This feeling is simply great!"

"I do not have a special time, or place for reading or writing. Whenever and wherever I feel the urge to write, I write, using my small note book to capture passing ideas from within me, and scenes from the outside."

"Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Nawal el Saadawi are some of my favourite authors. There are quite a number of Western authors, too numerous to mention here. I, however, identify with these three great African writers, because they have deep understanding of human psychology and pay attention to details. They accept that human beings are what they are, and behave according to the circumstances they find themselves in; no judgement."

"I already met one of my favourite authors, Prof. Chinua Achebe in December of 1986. I had no question to ask him, I simply listened to his advice, when I narrated to him an incident that required me to take a decision. “Zaynab,’’ he said, ‘’ don’t let anybody tell you what to do."

"Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien was the book I read last. The book reflects a world moving toward a certain direction, powered by both good and evil. It is a story of an entire universe in serious conflict and impending danger. The story says, this is also your world and you are not alone in it. It is just that we may not be conscious of the presence of the “others.”"

"I have no immediate plan to read a new book because I am seriously engaged in writing someone else’s story."

"My library is next door to my home office for easy access, and it is arranged in an order of priority."

"I am a reader, as well as a writer. I read whenever I have the opportunity to do so, and as often as I can. My slogan for reading is, ‘’read a book a week.’’ You see, no matter how small the book you pick every week is, you will be sure to cover a lot of ground in reading by the end of a year."

"Writing in Nigeria is not a job, because it never pays."

"I research a lot depending on the subject-matter. The subject matter informs the nature of settings to be used in the story; historic, physical, socio-economic and political environments, also referred to as Time and Place/Space. For example if the setting is to be a hospital scene, my research will be to observe how the entire hospital management functions, and how medical and other technical staff operates."

"Ideas come from a lot of sources, experiences of friends, colleagues, neighbors, self and even strangers. However, my greatest source of gathering ideas is from listening to people talk about themselves, or about others, especially at public gatherings, weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals and the market place. A lot of ideas are also gathered at home among family members. The secret is to be a good listener, not talker."

"For me, there’s no special atmosphere for writing. Whenever I feel the urge, (known in literature as ‘inspiration’) I write, using my small note book to capture scenes from the outside and passing ideas from my mind."

"My major genre is the prose fiction, followed by short stories, and the central theme has always been about female empowerment. I am intrigued by mysteries, Sci-fi and detective books. As for children’s books, as I get older, I now realize the importance of writing for children."

"The time-factor. I often wish there are more hours in a day. When a writer is holding, rather tightly, to a demanding job, such as teaching, raising a family and fulfilling certain social obligations, writing can easily take a backbench."

"Unknown to many, there are some good female writers in Northern Nigeria, but they are not easily known because they write in Hausa language. For a wider audience, I have advocated for translations, for years, at various forums, at home and abroad."

"Writing in Nigeria is not a job at all, because a job pays. Writing at home does not. I certainly cannot remember the last time I heard from my publishers. Between the publishers and the book pirates a creative writer in Nigeria will have to have a better reason for writing. For me, writing is therapeutic. I find emotional and psychological healings in it. The act of writing has always been my life-line."

"I believe in the English saying that ‘No one ever kicks a dead dog’. I must be doing something worth talking about. Criticism, negative, or positive serves as a platform for my intellectual growth. In time, the ‘Mazauni gonin rawa’ will come to realize that strength and weakness have nothing to do with gender, they are personality traits. Society simply assigned weakness for women, perhaps based on physic."

"I teach, interact with students on daily basis, and supervise their theses. I create time for family members. I do not set a daily writing goal. It does not work for me that way. I realized also that I needed to be sober to write convincingly. I cannot write when I am excessively happy. Some days are simply blank. Often I would write when travelling, or at night when sleep escapes."

"Simple question, but difficult answer. At the age of eight, I literally held a hoe in my hands. Two plots of land were carved out for me from my mother’s land, one for okra, the other for groundnuts. I helped my mother pay my school fees. Many people would find this hard to believe. I am still holding a hoe, (in a sense). Hard work runs through my blood. It does not kill, but laziness does. If I were to write about myself I would have hundreds of titles, maybe a title for every page."

"A little bit of me is in every book I have written. Consciously, or unconsciously, an artist gives away a piece of the ‘self’. It is widely believed that a good piece of creative work is an extension of the artist."

"By the Grace of Almighty God, I want to believe that I have been able to touch the lives of people, not only through writing, but in other simple ways, and I intend to do that for as long as I live."

"Recommending any one of my books would depend on the target audience. For young adults, ‘The Stillborn’, for the teens, ‘The Virtuous Woman’, for a variety of readers, ‘From The Housewife’, to the university undergraduate to the footloose, ‘Cobwebs and Other Stories’, for those interested in family values, ‘The Descendants’ and for the symbolist, ‘The Initiates’."

"A book reads us as much as we read a book."

"Negritude is an ideology of the elite, completely devoid of meaning for the masses ... Negritude is an ideology suggesting that Africans are blessed with a soul and not reason. They would have us believe that Africans can sing, dance and feel, but not think."

"" The future of Nigeria is no longer in it's army as some of us used to think, but in the oil business."

"always remember that you are an Ajayi man. Don’t forget the Ajayi motto – In all things moderation, with exception of study."

"Now the books are arranged according to which characters I believe ought to be talking to each other."

"How often I have felt lonely even when with someone. Lonelier sometimes than when I’m on my own."

"I may be old, but farting and burping in public is not something I intend to succumb to. If I can help it."

"What is done is done and I’ll wait until I get home to see how bad things really are. Consider the birds in the sky, I remind myself. Consider the birds in the sky."

"I dream of being held. Of being touched. Of being desired again. Of being recognized. Of not having to worry about what other people might one day think of this, might already be thinking."

"Madness. Old age is a massacre. No place for sissies. No place for love songs. No place for dreaming. No place for dreaming erotic dreams"

"The architects must only have thought of women when they designed retirement homes, and assumed they liked to sit and stare solemnly at gardens all day."

"I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth."

"It’s tough out here, and sometimes when I read about Africa, I don’t see America being any better. It’s really a crying shame."

"How could I explain that the way he craved my body made me angry"

"I wonder if I should explain that it’s not that I don’t want to make love, only that after a long day of attending to others I’m craving space."

"Is every, every?’ ‘Everything’s fine,’ I say, sensing her struggle with the words."

"Thanks to my mum, I read many Puffin classics. I loved the miniature Beatrix Potter books, Richard Adam’s Watership Down, and tales of Brer Rabbit. As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."

"I tend to disagree with most end-of-year ‘best of’ arts lists, not so much for what’s on the lists but for what gets overlooked. In the realm of recent films for example, I would have loved more attention to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, especially his sonic and visual gem, Lovers Rock and the same for Jeymes Samuel’s directorial debut, The Harder They Fall, a casting tour-de-force. On the writing front, Yewande Omotoso’s novel, An Unusual Grief—a book about friendship, sex, grieving, domesticity, and depression is one that deserves more attention."

"Oh, there are so many! When I think of feature films, I imagine the intense drama of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero; the quiet grief, as well as the eroticism of Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief; the forbidden wartime love story of Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. Short stories such as Segun Afolabi’s ‘Monday Morning’ would also make for powerful and timely feature length films."

"In the realm of a TV series, I think of Wole Soyinka’s political satire Chronicles From The Land of the Happiest People On Earth and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, which might also lend itself to an animated film. There are so many exciting prospects within the genre of documentary films too. Take Hugh Masekela’s Still Grazing—how visually and sonically fabulous such a film could be. I’d also love to see my novels adapted for the screen. In Dependence as a feature film, and Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, as a TV series. Film broadens and expands our access to stories and opens many new possibilities for creative work."

"The 1960s struck me as such an exciting decade in which to start the novel—it was the time of independence movements across Africa, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and various countercultural movements across Europe. Artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Fela Kuti and the Beatles were amongst many to herald this change. But because I hadn’t lived through this decade myself, I had to do a lot of research for In Dependence for it to feel as historically authentic as possible. I loved the research which included reading back issues of local magazines and newspapers and interviewing people who’d lived through the period."

"Whenever I can’t find stories that I want to read, I try writing them for myself. In this case, I’d met many older women who’d lived colorful lives and yet when it came to fiction, I didn’t find stories that mirrored these lives, especially so when it came to the lives of Black women."

"For my second novel, I did almost no historical research. With Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun I played much more with form and with voice than I’d done in the past. As such, it was particularly gratifying to have the novel shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, a prize that rewards innovative approaches to fiction."

"This book came out of a personal search for greater perspective, inspiration and hope in the context of the current turbulence of our world. I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know the twelve people featured in this book, which allowed me to go beyond their public profiles to the more intimate conversations. They’ve all been an inspiration to me and as such I wanted to share their stories more widely."

"I’ve been surprised by how many young people as well as people who are not from the African Diaspora have found this book an inspiration and a comfort."

"Resist the temptation to write stories you’re expected to write and take inspiration from a wide array of art forms. Use all the tools available to improve your craft. Be innovative, be new! And when a door opens for you, hold it open for others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and we’re stronger together than on our own."

"I don’t have a single best book, but I enjoyed and learned a lot from the following: actor David Harewood’s memoir: Maybe I Don’t Belong Her: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery; poet Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest; and travel writer, Noo Sara-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China. I also enjoyed re-reading Hugh Masekela and Michael Cheer’s fabulous Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela. I also read a number of great manuscripts including two brilliant chapters from my brother’s work in progress: Common Property: An Intimate History of the 20th Century."

"I love the innovative nature of Olumide Popoola’s writings across literary genres and so I’m very much looking forward to her forthcoming novel, Like Water Like Sea. I am also looking forward to Hala Alyan’s new poetry collection: The Moon That Turns You Back."

"My main goal is to make progress on my current novel. I’d also like to play more with the new tools of artificial intelligence (AI) and have more conversations with writers about the future of writing in this age of AI, not just about what we might lose but what we might gain too."

"I have a number of books in other languages—aspirational books for when my language skills improve enough to be able to read them. I’m particularly keen to read more books by African authors that are not yet translated into English. The two that currently sit on my desk are translations from other European languages: La sombra de la Mulemba—Cuentos Africanos Lusófonos and Matemáticas Congolesas by Koli Jean Bofane. I would love to add to my bookshelves, many more books published in African languages."

"When was the last time you failed or faced rejection as a writer and how did you cope with it and what did you learn from the experience?"

"I’m thinking a lot about the fraught state of our world including the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. I’ve just started reading The Ukraine by writer Artem Chapeye, who is currently fighting for his country, as well as The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I’m also re-reading David Grossman’s To the End of the Land."

"Toni Morrison’s novel Home for the immense power of her story and the exquisite beauty of her language. I’ve read, re-read and listened to the book being read by the author."

"I usually begin with the idea of a character and then work on getting to know the character better. I’ve learned from actors that if I try to embody my characters physically, by walking, talking, and even dressing like them, then my characters become more real to me and therefore more believable on the page."

"I also never write about characters whose lives I don’t have at least some sense of or a genuine interest in. Having a deep interest in my characters gives me both the confidence and passion to stick with them and write them as best I can."

"It’s still rare to see eroticism explored in elderly female characters, but not so rare for male characters. Thanks to such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Philip Roth, I have many literary examples of older men’s desire, but far less when it comes to older women. Yet, when I speak to older women I hear from them many stories about desire– sexual and otherwise. So yes, desire was always going to be an important part of the book."

"The name, Morayo, means “I see joy” in Yoruba, so this already signals to some readers that joy has encircled her from birth. At the same time, Morayo works hard to stay optimistic through the challenges that life brings. She is someone who is interested in narrative and in the same way that she enjoys changing the endings of some of her favorite books, she also tries to embrace narratives that help move her forward rather than getting her stuck or depressed. I suppose I’ve written a character to inspire me."

"Thanks to my character, I too have begun to group my books in non-traditional ways. Thus far, my groupings, unlike Morayo’s, have been less about characters talking to each other and more about pairing authors. For example, I have Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison’s Home’s next to each other as well as God Help the Child next to Lila as there are thematic similarities in both pairings."

"And recently, because London has been on my mind, I’ve found myself placing Zadie Smith’s NW next to Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Ben Judah’s This is London. I, like Morayo, am interested in books expanding and enriching the literary landscape. As for my two novels, they currently still sit alphabetically on my shelves, happily wedged in between Jhumpa Lahiri, Amara Lakhous, Javier Marias, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"At the time that I began to write the novel I was simply looking for a really good love story set in my parent’s generation with at least one character from West Africa, and because I couldn’t find such a story, I tried writing it myself. As Toni Morrison says, if there’s a book you want to read but can’t find, then try writing it."

"Had I known that my first novel would become required reading for all students applying to university in Nigeria, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to write it. It has been an incredible honor for me to have a book read by so many people and especially exciting to know that the novel is, in some small way, inspiring a new generation of writers."

"I don’t find juggling easy. However, for the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to attend a few writing retreats (such as Hedgebrook) and that always gives my writing a boost. Currently, I’m not teaching, which makes it easier to prioritize my writing. The way that you’ve described your struggle to maintain balance certainly resonates for me."

"In the early stages of any project I need longer periods of unstructured time to delve deeply into the writing and to stick to the project. It’s easier for me to balance several things at once if I’m in the editing and polishing phases of writing. I’m almost always craving more time and solitude to write, but at the same time I know that being engaged in the world is what fuels my writing."

"Going to Hedgebrook was a transformative experience for me. I was already a published author before I went, but the experience of going to Hedgebrook and meeting other writers made me believe in myself as a writer and trust in my own voice more than I’d ever dared to before. I’ve always tried to support fellow writers and Hedgebrook has given me an even wider platform from which to do so."

"I never thought about the confluence of the two books in the way you’ve described it. I love it! This is part of the beauty of writing, being surprised by what others see. Yes, Tayo and Morayo would certainly have a lot to talk about–their relationship might even go further than a platonic one. Who knows! There are certainly thematic similarities between the books, especially around the notion of independence and interdependence. I also see a chronological continuation between both novels. I left Tayo and Vanessa at the end of In Dependence in their sixties and with Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun I moved to a character in her seventies. It would follow, therefore that my next book might feature a character in her eighties and perhaps some younger characters too. Which, coincidentally, at least thus far…is the way book three is looking."

"Thank you, Darlington. My hope is that this book will lead, in some small way, to a deeper and richer understanding of Africa and the African diaspora—of the many things we hold in common as well as our differences. Similarities range from experiences of racism and discrimination to police brutality, and to the fragility of democracies whether we’re talking about Nigeria, Zimbabwe, or America. Differences include personal histories, identities, backgrounds, and geographies."

"There are some in this book, like Michelle Obama, for example, who used the platforms they were given to effect change while others, such as Evan Mawarire, created a movement from the bottom up to speak truth to power. The twelve featured are a tiny subset of many others doing extraordinary things. My hope is that Between Starshine and Clay will inspire more writers to capture such stories and histories."

"Oh, so many things, especially the joyful moments that we shared. I remember, for example, the laughter between old friends Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates Jr. as Soyinka reminisced about Morrison teaching him the phrase “knock your socks off” but then failing to deliver on the promise of knocking his socks off with the choice of a restaurant that Soyinka found lacking—not enough pepper! Or the moment when I asked Morrison if we could talk about sex, to which she responded with a wry smile, “Yeah! I’m in a good position to talk about it, since it’s been like a thousand years. What do you want to know?” Or the day, when walking with 102-year-old Willard Harris, that she insisted I seize the opportunity to travel to the South Pole, repeatedly saying, “You go, girl!” And so it was that the stories and the laughter flowed. I also love the adage that several of them cite, from Michelle Obama to Lord Michael Hastings, Margaret Busby, and Senator Cory Booker—plant trees under whose shade other generations will sit. Each of those featured embodies this evocation."

"How I wish that Baldwin was still with us—he was so wise, and his work feels just as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. Baldwin’s presence is felt throughout this book in part because he meant so much to many of those featured, including Morrison. In Morrison’s eulogy for Baldwin, she refers to three gifts that he gave to her: tenderness, courage, and language. These are gifts that I feel he’s given to all of us, and of course Morrison has left us with similar gifts, too. A copy of Baldwin’s Collected Essays has sat close to my writing desk for more than two decades. It sits alongside Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa—my literary taliswomen."

"I have written about Baldwin in Between Starshine and Clay and elsewhere. Baldwin means a lot to me for the following reasons: he inspires me as a writer; he inspires me for his wisdom—his insights and clarity around many issues; and I identify with the various places and peoples of the African diaspora that he writes about from France to America. My introductory essay is a reverent nod to Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son with its personal exploration of race, histories, and countries lived in."

"Humans are fond of putting people into categories for all sorts of reasons, but oftentimes, especially when it comes to skin color and nationality, for creating hierarchies or pecking orders. As for my experiences of race and identity, that’s a very big question deserving of an essay-length response, hence my introductory chapter."

"But in brief, as a child of a multiracial marriage who has lived in various countries with different histories of race and racism, and as a scholar and novelist for whom race and identity feature fairly prominently in my work, it’s safe to say that these issues are weighty, albeit not to the point of holding me back. Here again is where I take my cue from Baldwin, who advocates remaining committed to the struggle against injustices while keeping one’s heart free of hatred and despair."

"My first thought is that there are, of course, harsher forms of exile. Morayo does at least have a comfortable place to live, food to eat, and access to health care. I also suspect that Morayo, with thoughts of the ethnic and religious strife that had taken place in her home city of Jos, might be quick to say that the internally displaced face the cruelest form of exile."

"In many ways, the story I chose to write is not what readers might associate with the archetypal immigrant or exile story. It’s not a story of someone who has arrived in a country without all the necessary documentation, or of someone living on the edges of society, just barely scraping by. I chose to write about a character who lives a life of the mind and is materially well off. Yet, as you highlight, she too faces hardships and loneliness in her old age."

"I’d met many older women who had lived colorful lives, and yet when it came to fiction I couldn’t find many stories that mirrored this, especially so when it came to the lives of Black women. Similarly, I couldn’t find many books that explored an older woman’s sexuality. I had many literary examples of older men’s desire, but far less when it came to older women, and so I decided to go there, albeit in a small way."

"You mention Abubakar’s wonderful novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, and I can tell you that when it came out I joked with him that his fifty-five-year-old Bintu could hardly be considered an old woman, at least not in comparison to my Morayo, two decades older. However, I hadn’t yet met Willard Harris, a real-life character and now a dear friend whom I write about in my new book. Mrs. Harris was ninety-seven years old when I first met her, and at that time she had a “gentleman friend” who was at least a decade younger than her. You know what they say about life being stranger or more interesting than fiction."

"Thank you, Darlington, and what a touching story! I’d love to meet your neighbor’s daughter. In terms of what inspired the novel, it was simply as Morrison once put it: If there’s a story you’re dying to read and you can’t find it, then write it. I was looking for a great interracial love story set in geographical locations and historical periods that I was particularly interested in—namely West Africa from the 1960s to present day—and because I couldn’t find that story, I attempted to write it."

"I think that every relationship has its complications, and in the case of Tayo and Vanessa, they had to contend with the added family and societal pressures of being an interracial couple at a time of pervasive colonial attitudes. In the 1960s, there was a great deal of societal resistance to interracial relationships, attitudes that arguably still persist to this day whether in the UK, America, or elsewhere. If I’d written a novel without complications, I also suspect that your neighbor’s daughter would have exercised her spirit of independence and found a different book to immerse herself in."

"I’m so grateful to Adichie for having written Half of a Yellow Sun with its focus on the Nigerian civil war. Her novel, alongside other books with the war at its core, including Soyinka’s memoir The Man Died, Chris Abani’s novella-in-verse Daphne’s Lot, and Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees, all give us a greater sense of the events and conditions of that horrific war. While the civil war is not the central focus of In Dependence, it forms part of the tragic backdrop to the story. In Dependence is deeply personal for me in that I am writing about my parents’ generation. This is not my parents’ story, but it could have been their story."

"That’s a really interesting observation. You’re right that there are similarities between the two protagonists. Tayo and Obi are roughly of the same generation, they both win scholarships to study abroad, and they return to Nigeria full of idealism before finding themselves buffeted by some of the same issues and challenges of the day. What’s also interesting is that it’s Vanessa who urges Tayo to read Achebe’s novels. When Tayo does read No Longer at Ease, he’s struck by how tragic the story is but doesn’t, at least not in his letter to Vanessa, go as far as reflecting on how Obi’s story might be relevant to his own life."

"The warmth that I feel toward Okigbo actually comes from hearing my father speak about him. In the late 1950s, my father was one of his students at Fiditi Grammar School, Ibadan, where Okigbo taught Latin and English literature and was also the sports coach. I suspect that my dad, the football team’s goalkeeper, might have been one of Okigbo’s favorite students. He recounts the story of how Okigbo came to him one afternoon and asked if he’d ever traveled in a car that went as fast as one hundred miles an hour. “Hop in,” said Okigbo to my father, and then proceeded to dazzle him with a speedy drive to the University of Ibadan in his red sports car."

"My father describes Okigbo as a fast-speaking, fast-driving, fun-loving, and extremely intelligent young man. He apparently had a flair for languages, routinely reciting passages of Ovid in Latin, and tutoring one student in Greek who subsequently got an A in the Greek exam. My dad also describes how Okigbo, along with the school headmaster, Alex Ajayi, would have various “bashes” over the weekend. They were, as my father later reflected, a high-powered Bloomsbury Group of young intellectuals and scholars. These are stories I wish we had more of, and they’re part of the impetus behind Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora."

"In these tumultuous times, I keep returning to James Baldwin’s essays and in particular to his Notes of a Native Son. He reminds me of the importance of holding on to two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time: staying committed to the struggles against injustices while keeping one’s heart free of hatred and despair."

"As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."

"Henry Louis Gates Jr’s op-ed piece in the New York times, Who’s Afraid of Black History? didn’t change my mind on the topic but it brought much needed perspective and insight to the current curriculum debates in the US."

"“Your Father Walks Like a Crab”"

"Find Someone To Grow Old With, And You’ll Never Grow Old. Find A Cause To Live For, And You’ll Never Die"

"The beauty of poetry shouldn’t be in how well the poet hides meaning between the lines. It should be in how easily he makes his readers discover them. A poem does not have to be difficult to be profound; ‘simple’ and ‘profound’ are not mutually exclusive."

"Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning."

"The pieces of life, even when put together, assembled, never amount to the life itself."

"She understood what perhaps they are only just learning. That if you attempt to clean the messiness of life you end up scrubbing the life away from living. We can't excise joy from pain."

"Coming from across cultures, I believe I mostly value difference as opposed to being threatened by it... Over time as I gain in knowledge and become braver I hope to set more stories solidly in Nigeria or Barbados but you cannot, as a writer, fake familiarity with a place – I don’t think so anyway."

"My mother died when I was 23, and apart from the recent birth of my children, that is the most profound experience of my life. The grief that followed is a sharp memory of mine and I’ve often joked that the experience irrevocably marked my writing."

"Regardless of how many years I’ve lived in South Africa I think of myself as a product of three nations: Barbados, Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria forms a very strong part of my sense of myself, my identity"

"Identity is complex. I love being a Nigerian, I love belonging to that identity even if my belonging is complex, due to my multiple identities and migratory life experience"

"When I think of dangerous women I don’t think of women in whose presence I am in danger. When I think of dangerous women I think of women in whose presence the dangers of life finally meet their match. The kind of dangers I’m talking about are the hypocrisies, the patriarchy, the rules that are no rules at all but simply ways to cheat freedom and oppress those who dare sing out"

"Dangerous women show up sometimes, they disturb something"

"Many of the women on the island of my birth are like this. Their bow tongues launch arrows into the world and never miss their mark"

"My grandmother was one such woman. For very long she convinced me only of her sweetness until one day when I commented on how lovely she was she, holding a pot of boiling water, said Muh dear there was time when I throw this water on you soon as look as yuh. It would appear, I learnt, that my sweet grandmother once had a temper. Most dangerous women do, an important ability to access their rage whose existence alone runs counter to nursery rhymes we were fed about sugar and nice"

"My mother’s cousins. Dangerous in the sense that they take up magnificent space, they know what it is to laugh even though they have cried too"

"I believed that the woman in front of me, frail and sitting, had eaten life, swallowed it completely whole. I imagine she danced, fell in love, made love, made children, made lives, and set people straight with her arrow-words. And you know, danger, in the way it manifests in these women, has never been more allowing or more generous"

"This is a new kind of meaning, this danger. A serious kind of love. For oneself, one’s kin; and what life is meant for. Dangerous. I didn’t say it then; I was too young and answered Doctor or Mother but ask me now what I wish to be when I grow up"

"Once you crash the idea of normal in your mind, all impossibilities become possible."

"Men are nothing. They are fools. The penis between their legs is all they are useful for. And even then, if not that women needed their seed for children, it would be better to sit on a finger of green plantain. Listen to my words. Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man’s promises."

"The choices we have to make in this world are hard and bitter. Sometimes we have no choices at all."

"I like doing things that put Africa and Africans on the map. My job and the stuff that I do allows me to come in contact with so many talented, incredibly hardworking people. Young but doing incredible stuff. I want the world to see them. And when I say the world, the truth is, in fact, more than anything, I’m talking about Africa, as in the African world."

"A real woman must always do the things she wants to do, and in her own time too. You must never allow yourself to be rushed into doing things you're not ready for."

"The sad truth is, polygamy constitutes a national embarrassment in any country that fantasises about progress and development. Polygamy devalues women and the only person who revels in it is the husband who gets to enjoy variety. You, poor women, will become nothing more than a dish at the buffet."

"Now, in my working life as a teacher and writer, and as a mother of four children, I watch with horror when women of my generation opt to be second or third wives. And I have been shocked by the ease with which men in their mid-30s marry additional wives."

"Husband-sharing is ugly and, one way or another, someone's dreams are crushed when a new wife joins a household."

"The world has no patience for spinsters. It spits them out."

"When a plan does not go right, you plot again. One day you will succeed. One day you will be able to damage the person who hurts you so completely that they will never be able to recover."

"Anyone who laughs at you for showing your family respect is a fool."

"“Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man's promises”"

"“My daughters were born with eyes in their stomachs so they are quick to digest all that they see.”"

"“Even listening in on their plans for me did not take the tomato seller off my mind. After searching for days, I traced her to the farmland on the edge of our village. When I saw her, courage failed me. My liver weakened and I could not bring myself to talk to her. I abandoned my fufu and stalked her, overjoyed to be breathing the air she was breathing. I saw every man she teased. A gasp escaped my lips every time she rolled her hips and jiggled the beads that adorned her waist. Sweat was dripping from my neck like rain from the awning. I can’t explain why but I wanted her for myself. I wanted to build a house for her and keep the key between my breasts. I wanted to dress her in the finest aso oke so she could parade herself for my delight alone. I wanted to lock her between my thighs.”"

"“Men are so simple. They will believe anything.”"

"“How could I tell her that I had failed to preserve my dignity? I was too ashamed to let her see the fickle shell I’d become. Inevitably, it became unbearable. The more she pushed, the more I resisted. I didn’t want a job! I didn’t want a white wedding! I just wanted the war between who I used to be and who I’d become to end. I didn’t want to fight anymore.”"

"“If you drag her by the hair, she’ll follow you anywhere, I swear it!”"

"“Don’t think I can’t see the challenges ahead of me. People will say I am a secondhand woman. Men will hurt and ridicule me but I won’t let them hold me back. I will remain in the land of the living. I am back now and the world is spread before me like an egg cracked open.”"

"My fingers liked the feel of money. My eye liked to see the piles of money swell. I worshipped money."

"Even when the boys teased me over flap of flesh that circled my neck, I wasn't bothered. I looked at them and sniggered, knowing their father's fathers could not have a fraction of the wealth i have accummulated."

"Let us not allow the world to see our shame, let us keep our secrets from those who may seek to mock us"

"Taju claimed that he’d beaten his wife senseless for letting his only son suck on a coin. This happened about a week after a male senator slapped a female colleague. The slap had resonated through all the quiet meeting rooms of the senate building and into the heart of every man on the street…men were slapping their womenfolk as if it had become a national sport…peeved taxi drivers prodded the heads of mothers who bargained with them; young girls were assaulted and stripped naked in the streets. Even in the labour wards baby girls frowned upon by their fathers. Taju too was inspired to throw his best punch"

"Baba Segi only comes to deposit his seed in my womb. He doesn’t smile or tickle me. He doesn’t make jokes about my youth; he just rams me into the mattress…"

"Your father left me for a beautiful woman. I told him I was pregnant but he didn’t want to hear it. He sliced me like okra and left."

"A mob wielding cudgels and cutlasses is hot on the heels of a youthwho desperately crosses to the other side of the road, narrowlymissing the fender of a truck. The mob follows growing bigger asit goes. The youth, looking over his shoulder as he runs, crashesinto a light pole and falls senseless to the ground. Before he canregain a second wind the mob is on him. I watch the cudgels riseand fall; I hear his wailing ululating screams finally turn into awhimper. They poured petrol on him and set him ablaze"

"The students, who should have been busy taking theirbaths and getting set for lectures, sat idly...discussing the boycottof lectures"

"More than once ourtaxi was forced to hug the kerb as siren blaring military jeepspassed at top speed...”"

"There had been an accident. Bola’s family-father, mother, and twosisters had been in a car crash. It was late in the evening...theywere on their way to Ibadan for a visit...The father driving hadfailed to see the truck laying on its side in the middle of the road.It was a military truck carrying the furniture of an officer ontransfer from Lagos to Ibadan. The father and mother, who were in front, had died instantly; Peju, the elder sister, died on the way to the hospital; the other sister, Lola, sustained minor injuries"

"Look out there, see the long queue of cars waiting for fuel. Someof them have been there for three days...And we are a majorproducer of oil"

"The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had theunfinished, abandoned appearance of an under waterscape.Crouching under the bigger or in their own clusters were hastilybuilt wood and zinc structures that housed an incredibly largenumber of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers,laborers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms"

"We don finally reach the end of the road. We don dey together since I was born, but now time don come wey me and you must part. Bye-bye.Goodnight. Ka chi foo. Oda ro. Sai gobe"

"Hagar takes to prostitution whenrejection and hunger look her straight in the face"

"Look, we are living under siege. Their very presence on our streetsand in the government house instead of the barrack where theybelong is an act of aggression. They hold us cowed with guns sothat they will steal our money—they will continue subjugating uskilling all dissenters one by one, sending them to exile till there isno competitor left to oppose them."

"We came to tell you sir, that our clinic is run-down and abandoned.We came to tell you that we don’t have a single borehole onMorgan street... we are here to protest against this neglect--- weare dying from diseases. We are dying from a lack of hope. Andthat is why we are here today to protest. And this is the way wefeel we ought to express our displeasure"

"You must take a year off, one of these days, before you’re old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you’ll see the world in a different way."

"Can you continue to love a person regardless of such shortcomings? Maybe because you hope to save them? Or because you can't help it? Isn't that what love is all about?"

"Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth."

"The further from home you wander, the closer you get to Siberia."

"Nostalgia settled on my shoulders like the arm of a long-lost friend, urging me to look back and listen; it had been years since I heard such morning sounds, such silence."

"I've seen children snatched away from their mothers, never to be reunited. I've seen husbands taken from their wives and kids and sent away to prison. I've seen grown men flogged by soldiers in front of their kids. That's how history is made, and it's our job to witness it."

"There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a stranger in a strange city."

"Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect."

"Our story is over, the ink has dried, each of us must move on now and it will be as if we had never met, never loved, and never dreamt together."

"I didn't love him. He was a good, decent guy, but I wanted more at that time." She shrugged. "I was not so young anymore. Time was passing for me. I wanted more… excitement."

"Sometimes poets have to be imperfect so their poetry can be perfect."

"Happiness is important, but I wouldn't say it is the main purpose of human existence."

"I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me."

"People don’t fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it’s too much."

"You don't need attention to write. All you need is passion for your work and an overwhelming desire to tell a story you genuinely care about. Readers can sense your sincerity and it separates you from pretenders."

"I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I needed to tell."

"She drinks her Eva water. Their parents were taken down by cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Respectable diseases."

"Most of the children were shoeless and you were confronted with the dilemma that, no matter how much money you had and no matter where you could escape to overseas, you could not save yourself from your own country."

"I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain."

"I get stage fright with short stories . For me it feels like stand up comedy: kill or die. I’m more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail"

"Cooking was a skill, I thought; an art form. In our country, we appreciated the end result, but not the craft, perhaps because we didn’t have fancy names. Paring was “cut it.” Julienne was “cut it well.” Chopping was “cut it well well,” and so on till you had puree, which would probably be “mash it.” And, if anyone was measuring any ingredient in a kitchen, it meant that they really didn’t know what they were doing."

"It occurred to me that there was nothing more precious than satisfaction. That it was possible to end up committing a crime just because you were contaminated by a little discontent. You could convince yourself that you were satisfied, then someone could come along and say, 'But I can offer you more', and then you could begin to think, My life is not worth much after all. In fact, you could tell yourself, My life was completely worthless from the start."

"History is very important to my work in that regard and thank you for noticing. I’m no expert on Fanon, but I used the quotation as an epigraph because I found it amusing and apt. The bourgeois phase in the history of a country like Nigeria is indeed completely useless, which is why the novel ends as it begins, with middle-class preoccupations, despite the political changeover that occurs in the story."

"The quotation is for those whom it may concern. Our country doesn’t work. We know that. We also know why. What we may not be ready to accept is that progress will continue to elude us so long as we follow trajectories that are alien to us, the most damaging of which are driven by unbridled capitalism. This is not to suggest that a return to our traditional systems is the way forward; I don’t idealise them in the novel."

"Nigeria isn’t exactly a newly industrialised country either, but we have engaged in trading activities for centuries, and have a history of selling people for mere beads. Fast forward to what we have witnessed of late, with our governments selling us down the river by privatising public utilities, and contracting out public services, such as waste management, to foreign companies. Yet we still don’t have regular electricity supply or a clean environment."

"We call that development, but at every traffic light along the way are beggars, most of whom are children and disabled adults. Some are amputees and presumably they are often victims of sharia law punishments. We look away only to see billboards advertising business conferences at mega churches."

"Perhaps living in other countries has given me a different perspective, but for me these are not signs of a country’s progress, by which I mean its advancement towards freedom, justice and equality. The way we are going, I don’t think we’re prepared for the political impacts, social shifts and economic disparities that will come, and we still have no common ideology that unites us more than capitalism does."

"Yet it benefits only a minority of us and fails the rest of the country. In fact, it is the underlying cause of our moral failings, and whether or not you care about the welfare of your fellow citizens, being a member of the elite can no longer save you. There is nowhere to hide from the dysfunction, which is why Nigerians who can afford to, escape abroad as often as they can."

"Even activism is for personal gain in Nigeria, so it’s no surprise that nothing improves. Should that happen, activists would be out of business. I am part of the world I complain about, but writing is not business as usual for me. It is an expression of hope that I might, in my small way, play a part in bringing about change. Now, you can’t kill the beast by feeding it, but you can slip poison into its food, which is what I attempt to do by writing honestly."

"In this particular novel, the Fanon quotation identifies the process we’re going through and explains our failures so far. What I then do is show we are products of complex pre- and postcolonial systems that determine our orientations. The heart of the story, though, is Remi Lawal’s difficult relationship with Nigeria."

"If anyone says they fit in nicely with the Nigerian upper class, I would have to come to the conclusion that they are thoughtless. No one is responsible for their upbringing and no one deserves to be defined by any social class. My late father was the son and great-grandson of traditional rulers and he attended Oxford University. I often joke that the women in my mother’s family carry themselves as if they are royalty. They are proud of their parents, who worked hard to educate them."

"When I was a child, I was called oniranu a lot at home because I poked fun at people I ought to respect. I was about six years old when I made up a song about a certain Lagos society woman. One line, I remember, said she had rashes, even though she didn’t. I’m still an oniranu at heart. I never grew out of it. In my play Lengths to Which We Go, which you’ve read, I have an aspiring character called Mrs. Babalola who calls herself upper “clarse”."

"In my short story “Unsuitable Ties”, I have a snobbish character called Biola whom I refer to as an authority on class since her early schooling in Switzerland. Characters like these provide comic relief for me. Blame the British as well. They left us with a social construct called class distinction, which makes no sense except to justify the oppression of the majority of Nigerians."

"I suppose the reason I write about the Lagos elite at all is that they don’t become writers. Ikoyi people in particular are underrepresented in Nigerian literature. Ikoyi itself is often described as a place where rich, powerful people live. But when I was growing up there, the people I knew were not unlike those who lived on Victoria Island, and districts on the mainland such as Apapa and Ikeja, and estates such as Alaka and Palmgrove."

"The people who gave Ikoyi a bad name were the ones who rarely allowed other Nigerians into their social circles, except to serve and look up to them. Occasionally they were open to outsiders who had as much money and were equally materialistic. They were self-conscious but not particularly self-examining, and they were afraid to admit their vulnerability. As my protagonist Remi Lawal notes at the Dadas’ cocktail party in the novel, their lives are full of frivolous contradictions and, ultimately, they are replaced from one generation to the next. She is right about that. Ikoyi of 1976 is not the same as it is today. That society is gone now. The band and the song have changed."

"You know, I’ve also been called a Lagos writer and a feminist writer, but I just tell stories that interest me in ways that interest me. Growing up in Ikoyi, I had friends who used drugs. Friends who discovered their fathers had girlfriends, second wives and other children. Friends whose mothers were victims of physical and emotional abuse. Friends whose parents got divorced. I never thought any of those families were dysfunctional. To me, such things were just part of family life. But I always heard about them from third parties because appearance was everything in Ikoyi, most especially the appearance of respectability."

"I break that down in the novel, and in that sense it’s no different from novels I’ve read about suburban life in the United States, England and elsewhere, except it has moments of political intrigue and turmoil. I juxtapose these extraordinary national moments and ordinary domestic moments to give a realistic portrayal of how we lived. Perhaps my real motive is to depict Nigeria as one big dysfunctional family."

"No. I’ve never even read a Le Carré novel, but I slept with a few in a bookcase behind my headboard. My mother was a Le Carré fan. I studied Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when I was at school in England, which turned me into a fan of his prose. I realise my novel ventures into white male territory by playing with the idea of espionage and satirising high society. When you do that as an African woman writer, someone is bound to ask, “Why are you here? Have you lost your way? Do you know where you are going?” But I was raised by a woman whose experiences were not limited by her gender or nationality."

"I’ll tell you a couple of family stories. The first is that my mother met Graham Greene in a shop on Bond Street. Neither of us can remember the exact year it happened and she says the shop has since closed down. The funny part is that she’d never heard of him. After he left, the shop assistant mentioned his name and said he was a famous author. To this day I wish I’d been with her, just to confirm it was him. The second story is that during the coup that brought General Muhammed to power in 1975, an expatriate woman befriended my mother."

"We’d never seen the woman before, but she came to our house in south-west Ikoyi for a few nights and talked to my mother about the coup. On her first night she had dinner with us – osso buco. I remember this because it was a rare treat I looked forward to eating. We had no electricity at night, so my mother reheated it on a kerosene stove and we boiled rice and fried plantains. We ate dinner at the table with a battery lantern. I don’t recall details of what the woman said, but she soon stopped coming over and my mother said she had to be a spy. Of course I made fun of my mother."

"It doesn’t matter whether Frances Cooke – the bead collector – was spying or not. It was enough to show there were allegations in those days, which may have been partly due to xenophobia. Ikoyi, however, was where business and political leaders lived, and the United States did have an interest in spreading neo-liberal ideas to developing countries like Nigeria."

"I’m never afraid when I write. I’m sometimes nervous after my books are published, by which time it’s too late to censor myself. When you write boldly, you get mixed reactions and I assume it will be the same with this novel. Not just because of its content, but because of the way I’ve written it. Much of what we’ve talked about may be overlooked by readers who want more to happen in an African novel, but I don’t write to accommodate their needs. Also, whenever you write about privileged Africans, someone somewhere will be upset with you."

"Lastly, as you know, we have a few critics in the Nigerian literary community who are caught up in the old Igbo-Yoruba rivalry, which doesn’t interest me, but their reviews reflect that. I’m used to having different responses to my work. I don’t expect everyone to appreciate what I write and I’m thankful to readers who do."

"Not even crocodiles eat their young...papa takes care of his children."

"If you prefer sitting in traffic to sitting at your desk, if you pass office hours waiting for closing time, if you spend more time on Facebook than you do attending to important emails then perhaps it's time for you to consider quitting your job."

"Be courageous, not brave. Bravery was to dash out of the bomb shelter and grab the child left crying on the veranda. Courage was to go to the stream the day after a bomb had scattered your friend on that path because water must be fetched to sustain the life that was left"

"There is no Muslim Nigeria and no Christian Nigeria. There is only one indivisible Nigeria. Kaduna belongs to all Nigerians. No religion endorses violence or gratuitous cruelty. Regrettably, some undesirable elements have incited these ugly clashes and those elements will be fished out and properly punished."

"People who are quick to pay compliments, baby-baby, are also quick to withdraw them."

"Blood is thicker than water, you hear. Ha! Let me tell you, some blood flows thinner. And some water is as thick as sludge."

"S is for sins. What is a sin? At Catechism, she was taught to repeat, 'Sin is an offence against reason, truth and right conscience.' But she could not tell what sins she was supposed to be atoning for. What were her mother's sins? Mma swallowed all the words she wanted to say and started eating the food she no longer tasted."

"S is for sir. It's what you called your father if you'd never lived with him. If you did not know where his medication box was. If you did not even know what he was taking medication for. No, sir. Yes, sir. S is for strangers multiplied by five. Ten eyes watching her, sizing her up, maybe wondering what she was doing there. What was she doing here? And all this talk of tradition, which had pushed her mother away in the first place. Roll. Dip. Swallow. She had met her father."

"A parent never apologises, even if he regrets his actions. It is the child who should apologise."

"Sometimes in life, we have to take a stand. It does not help to sit on the fence, even if we have to hurt the people we love-love. That is what I want you to remember. If I have taught you anything, I want it to be that."

"You children, you forget that no matter how high the okra tree grows, it's never mightier than the hand that planted it."

"No matter the size of your husband's penis, no other woman should know it."

"It is not the thing that we fear the most that crushes us but that which we have failed to fear."

"Determination makes one impervious to pain."

"Never give up if your heart and your head tell you are right. People can disappoint you, but your heart and your head will never. Make them your best friends."

"Life is like a set of false teeth. The world sees what you show it: Clean teeth wey white like Colgate. But you know for inside dat your real teet' don rot finish!"

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger."

"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger."

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering."

"Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard."

"In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry."

"In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the Living. They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn’t redeemed, all that they hadn’t understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins."

"You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone."

""How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay."

"Learn to drink, my son. A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life."

"The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you."

"When I woke up I found myself in a coffin. My parents had given me up for dead. They had commenced the burial proceedings when they heard my fierce weeping. Because of my miraculous recovery they named me a second time and threw a party which they couldn’t afford.They named me Lazaro. But as I became the subject of much jest, and as many were uneasy with the connection between Lazaro and Lazarus, Mum shortened my name to Azaro."

"One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us."

"This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down."

"A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life."

"We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see."

"A dream can be the highest point of a life"

"Before everything was born there was first the spirit. It is the spirit which invites things in, good things, or bad. Invite only good things, my son. Listen to the spirit of things. To your own spirit. Follow it. Master it. So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use. There is a stillness which makes you travel faster. There is a silence which makes you fly. If your heart is a friend of Time nothing can destroy you."

"Many people reside in us. Many past lives, many future lives. If you listen carefully the air is full of laughter. Human beings are a great mystery."

"There will be changes. Coups. Soldiers everywhere. Ugliness. Blindness. And then when people least expect it a great transformation is going to take place in the world. Suffering people will know justice and beauty. A wonderful change is coming from far away and people will realise the great meaning of struggle and hope. There will be peace."

"Apart from a mark on my palm I had managed to avoid being discovered. It may simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going. It is terrible to forever remain in-between."

"The clearing was the beginning of an expressway. Building companies had levelled the trees. In places the earth was red. We passed a tree that had been felled. Red liquid dripped from its stump as if the tree had been a murdered giant whose blood wouldn’t stop flowing."

"The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time."

"I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you."

"When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are."

"I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality."

"Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes."

"So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite… The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss."

"If your work can surprise you then you have started something worthwhile."

"For your reflections reflect on the things you do. And the things you do reflect on you."

"Quiet people are the most dangerous."

"Craft is important. The greater the idea, the greater the craft you need."

"Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs."

"Be like the tortoise- grow a hard shell to protect your strong heart. Be like the eagle- soar above your pain and carry the banner and the wonder of our lives to the farthest corners of the world. Build your strength. Destiny is difficult."

"Responsibility is active. Vigilant. Actions become character and character becomes destiny. . .the moment you see something is wrong, you have a responsibility."

"What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things."

"Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive."

"If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom."

"To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness."

"Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories."

"What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?"

"Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind."

"Inverse of the word live is evil."

"How the city attracts all types and how the unwary must suffer from ignorance of its ways."

"His motto had become money, money, money. This was the way people of the city realized themselves."

"We want a new life, new opportunities ... We want to live there for some time -- but only for some time ! We have our homeland here and must come back when we can answer your father's challenge ! When we have done something, become something!"

"But now things are different. Yes, things are gradually passing into African hands. Soon al the power will be in our hands. It's worth fighting for."

"He looked out of the window, as if the interview gave him some pain, and for a moment I studied him silently."

"He looked over his shoulder, like a thief entering a strong room, and his voice sank low."

"I wish I could tell you my story…I feel you would understand”…. to a stranger he met fortuitously on the train and for two days had travelled with in silence"

"....I was born sixty-five years ago, at a time when man was man, and women were won by those who deserved them."

"....Tonight, one of you is going to win the hand of my daughter Zarah. But he must be the bravest of you all. We live in times when a man’s might is his right."

"the cry of someone in great pain, a person who immediate help would mean everything."

"can you hear me now? I shall not rest, for I shall know no peace until I have avenged you."

"Not a war. But then, it was a war. When the forest burns do the locusts stop to say goodbye?"

"I say there has been a war. If a fish comes out of the water and says the crocodile has one eye, who has been there with him?"

"Night might convert the old devil into a fiend."

"A maiden is one of those things a man must not trust. By Allah, it is!"

"He who waits will see what is in the grass."

"You pay twenty head of cattle for a maiden because you are excited. Then when your head is cool, you begin to say "If I had known!"

"On the day of death, there is no medicine."

"We may differ in the language we speak, yet we all remain children of the land."

"We should, I think, proceed to enquire into what we mean by ideals - or rather, to examine, critically, the nature of those acts which to us appear to be outward manifestations of idealisms."

"What can a woman do? You say everyday. In the end, a woman does something, and even then still you look down on women."

"There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved."

"There was nothing in me when I was in school that made me feel I was going to be a writer. It was one of those things that just happened. I didn’t have the ambition to say, “Oh, Flora, you are going to be a writer, so work towards it"

"We are well, Efuru replied. It is only hunger. It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for."

"Efuru told him that she would drown herself in the lake if he did not marry her. Adizua told her he loved her very much and that even the dust she trod on meant something to him."

"I am sure you will like this gin. Nwabuzo had it buried in the ground last year when there was rumour that policemen were sent to search her house. When the policemen left, finding nothing, Nwabuzo was still afraid and left it in the ground. A week later, she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital where she remained for six months. She came back only a week ago. So the gin is a very good one."

"They did not see the reason why Adizua should not marry another woman since according to them two men do not live together. To them Efuru was a man, since she could not reproduce."

"If I am considered the doyenne of African female writers, the glory goes to the oral historians and griottes who mesmerized me with stories about the mystical powers of Ogbuide, the mother of the lake, my family members of industrious women and men who served as role models, as well as my penchant for service and the pursuit of excellence."

"I don’t think that I’m a radical feminist,”"

"I don’t even accept that I’m a feminist. I accept that I’m an ordinary woman who is writing about what she knows. I try to project the image of women positively."

"Women have always been powerful and striven to achieve financial independence. I wanted a politics that fought for expanding and nurturing the power that women already had. It is not that I believed that there was no such thing as gender inequality. I just did not want to see a woman as a victim but as someone who was always enterprising and looking for ways to undermine the systems of power that tried to put her down."

"Feminism was a politics of empowerment that assumed that a woman was a victim. I saw feminism as a politics that had to first position women as victims so that it can then empower them."

"As Adiewere and Efuru were eating, a troop of children with shining tummies in front of them were seen approaching. "These children are just in time. The way they time themselves is admirable."

"When Efuru went home, Ajanupu could not help admiring her character. "She is a woman among women. I like the way she is carrying her burden. She still loves that imbecile husband of hers and she is going in search of him."

"The novel captures the ongoing changes in Nigerian society where women strive for (economic) independence and personal happiness and growth rather than a life within the boundaries of an outdated tradition. In stressing the economic independence of women, Nwapa reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her essay “A Room Of One’s Own”."

"Contrary to Woolf, who I personally always found to be overly dramatic and elitist, and, thus, exclusive, in her viewpoints and demands to literature and feminism, Nwapa did not think of herself as a feminist. At the same time, she is crucially aware of the misrepresentation of women in literature by fellow male authors who tend to display women as prostitutes or mischievous creatures, all of which Nwapa counteracts in her own writing by displaying women as positive, independent and real as they are."

"Bombing the Terrorists with planes from the skies is not enough, we have to go to the source of their sinning souls and bomb them, condemn them and shame them, with all the power of our pens, our computers, our smartphones and our creative works!"

"Our writers must continue to educate our people and promote the cause of nation-building by producing powerful, inspiring and enduring works of art."

"....The prestige African literature enjoys globally today is a result of the ground-breaking work done by Achebe (especially with his Things Fall Apart) and a few other writers like him."

"In a society, a woman should be able to tolerate others, work with others and maintain a very humble attitude towards others but at the same time be herself."

"My mum always taught us not to expect favours but to work hard to make our way in life and to aim to get things through merit."

"Men and women complement each other in a home and in the society at large. God has given each a place, a role and responsibilities. It does not make one any better than the other or give any the right to lord it over or ill-treat the other."

"I believe this was their way of ensuring we understood our heritage, where we came from, who we were and what we stood for. I think that is really key for any child to know who they are and be proud and confident in that.""

"My novel came before the story: I decided to write a novel before I knew what to write about. The story wasn’t burning in my heart or bursting to be let loose on the page. It didn’t feel like there was this one story that I had to tell. But I have always been fascinated by why people do the things they do. While trying to come up with ideas for my novel, I decided on a story that explored that."

"It would have to be one of those dangerous pieces of advice that people dish out all over the place. A particularly popular one is: Follow your heart. What if the person’s heart is leading them into a dungeon of doom? What if the person’s heart is filled with foolishness? ‘Follow your heart’ is not just unwise counsel; it is a recipe for anarchy. Imagine a world where each of us followed our heart to wherever it led us, without caring for the people around us or the laws of the land."

"Everyone can tell a story, but the skillful use of words is what I usually find captivating when reading a piece. The imagery. The alliteration. The emotion. The quotable quotes. Think Shakespeare. Think the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The skillful placing of word against word is what builds the masterpiece and turns a story into a memorable work of art. I often tell people how fascinated I was with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But while I have absolutely no recollection of the plot, I still remember how struck I was by her use of words. Her writing was pure art."

"I spit out everything onto the page, from beginning to end, and then go back and edit. I’m one of those people who like to tick off things on my to-do list; so, it helps me psychologically to get to the end first, and then settle down to revise."

"I Do Not Come To You By Chance is set in the world of Nigeria’s 419 scammers. It was a world I was very familiar with having grown up in South East­ern Nigeria. There were lots of people, lots of young men I knew who were going to, who were 419 scammers. So I wanted to write a story of how people from good homes, people from the kind of home I came from could become international financial terror­ists."

"If it was authoritarian for the Nigerian government to ban the use of Twitter, it was even more problematic for an American swivelling in a chair in Silicon Valley to poke their finger into the internal affairs of a sovereign African state."

"Although his position on the family tree could not be described in anything less than seven sentences, Odinkemmelu was introduced to us as our cousin."

"He brought out an it-was-white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brows."

"Dear Friend, I do not come to you by chance. Upon my quest for a trusted and reliable foreign business man or company I was given your contact by the Nigerian chamber of Commerce and Industry, I hope that you can be trusted to handle a transaction of this magnitude."

"Is honesty an achievement? Personality is one thing, achievement is another thing. So what has your father achieved? How much money is he leaving for you when he dies? Or is it his textbooks that you’ll collect and pass on to your own children?"

"Odinkemmelu took his body odor away to the kitchen and returned with a teaspoon of salt."

"My tender triceps started grumbling"

"My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician."

"Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his five limbs were thick and long."

"Make una come see o, Graveyard don begin dey use perfume."

"At age seven, when it was confirmed that her right hand could reach across her head and touch her left ear, Augustina moved back to her father’s house and started attending primary school. Being long and skinny had worked to her advantage."

"Boniface — aka Cash Daddy — is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He's also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell."

"For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a 'long-leg' — someone who knows someone who can help him — his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents' low-rent house."

"Being the opara of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges — a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard."

"When a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking."

"Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached."

"When we bury ourselves in a story that is well told, we can’t help but go away with an understanding that we may not have had before. We go away with being able to see things perhaps a little more clearly, a little more humanely."

"what would be considered a middle-class setting, where women seem to have power, but they are living in a particular context that requires them to contort themselves into different things. And so they make choices that are not necessarily the kindest choices for others or choices that we would consider to be good."

"If you get all your schoolwork for the day done in, say, three hours, you can spend the rest of the time reading or making up stories or whatever else."

"I went to school in England and I was taught about slavery, but I was taught about it from a very European point of view - that this was a horrible episode, but actually, Europeans then realised that it was a terrible thing they were doing and so very kindly, as a gift, gave freedom to the slaves."

"How we danced. The music poured through our veins and we flowed with the beat. The wheel had come full circle. We wound and unwound our bodies seamlessly as if we had no bones. Is there a sight more beautiful, the older women said, than a Yoruba girl dancing?"

"Through Yoruba Girl Dancing, Simi Bedford ingeniously, entertainingly, eloquently, and intelligently examines the complicated issues of home and identity, language and diaspora, in multiple contexts."

"You can read a lot of books and the main characters are white people - especially in the classics - and after a while you forget that you're not white, almost, because it's this big pervasive culture. And then you find books like Yoruba Girl Dancing [by Simi Bedford] and you think: it's just as interesting to be Nigerian in England as it is to be white in England."

"In my pre-teen years, I read books such as Yoruba Girl Dancing by Simi Bedford, Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell and books by Rosa Guy. I also read a lot of Enid Blyton and Betsy Byars."

"daughter wants to marry at a young age, I would first have the necessary conversations with her and if i know this is what she needs, i will allow her. I won’t allow premarital sex in my house."

"My religion has a great influence on my lifestyle and definitely my work. Coming from a very Islamic background, I see and take the Islamic point of view all the time. I let the Qur’an and Sunnah guide my actions and decisions always."

"I think they must tackle three important sectors: power, refineries and diversify our economy. Then, a systematic eradication of corruption must kick start these three."

"People’s experiences define how they view life. A man who has been through it all, he might want to resort to the village, it’s not so much of a bad idea to catch them young. When you pick a poor girl,a girl from her back ground knowing that her expectations fall in line with what you want.Men who successfully marry from the village, know all she wants and her definition of success will be to give birth and take care of their children"

"Travelling has taught me that people are the same all over the world – some irritating, some helpful."

"The soul (spirit) finds respite in books."

"I visit Africa as much as I can and all my books have an African setting. I get my ideas from reading, listening to people and observing people too."

"I don’t have a formula, or a place I can go to get ideas from, for a new book. Usually, ideas come when I least expect them. I could be doing something so boring, like washing up, and bingo, a voice pops up in my head."

"Make u no worry. That be how life be. Sometimes it go up, up, up, and sometimes it come down, down, down. When it go up, you get many friends. But when it come down, your friends run away."

"It is clear that she (Ulasi) has produced five mysteries. The novels are indeed mysteries ... set in what Hortense Spillers, in another context, refers to as the "terrain of witchcraft" (1987, 189). In Ulasi, seeing is not always believing or deceptive. Her intriguing genre, the juju novel, appears to be Nigeria's answer to the gothic and magic realism ... Ulasi's terrain covers the occult, dark, impenetrable tropical forests; in short, vestiges of the supernatural world, which proliferate the Nigerian imagination."

"Decades ago I read Adaora Lily Ulasi's Many Thing You No Understand. When I read the work, who would have thought about the strange happenings in my nation, Nigeria?Adaora, who passed on in 2016, also wrote Many Thing Begin for Change, and The Man from Sagamu Let me say that as we keep mute or play mute, as we pay lip service things are changing, and the resultant effect is one that we may not be able to cope with...."

"Old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said I would find out where my palm-wine tapster who had died was."

"ZURRJIR’ which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon."

"When I completed three and a half years in that town, I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree throne, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age.”"

"As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”"

"The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living."

"Alo is a lie!"

"Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?"

"The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration."

"Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard."

"I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life."

"When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine."

"This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man."

"By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground."

"So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife."

"I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays."

"But I did not know that all that I was thinking in mind was going to the hearing of the inhabitants of these three rooms, so at the same moment that I wanted to move my body to go the room from which the smell of the African’s food was rushing to me […] there I saw that these three rooms which had no doors and windows opened unexpectedly and three kinds of ghosts peeped at me, every one of them pointed his finger to me to come to him."

"Performed a juju which changed me to a horse unexpectedly, then he put reins into my mouth and tied me on a stump with a thick rope."

"I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it’s good. But what if you don’t fit into what is expected of you? If you’re a man, there’s support. If you’re a woman, like Yejide, there’s the expectation that you marry into a family and after a couple of years you have children, and you have a measure of power. I wanted to look at what would happen if you could choose to be what you’re supposed to be, and how the community, in trying to help you become what you think you should be, turns on you."

"I wanted to look at the subtle ways that Nigerians interacted with the Nigerian state. One of the ways we survive darkness—and there’s a lot of darkness in this book—is to find reasons to laugh. Laughter in those kinds of situations becomes essential. It’s not a luxury. It’s not just something you do because you feel like laughing. It’s been one of the ways I’ve coped myself. I wanted to bring that to this book because it would be miserable if there was no humor…"

"There is a strong view in Nigeria, as in many other cultures, that a marriage is not complete without children. I don’t agree; I’m wary of the idea that people have to have some particular functionality in order to be full members of society. I think it’s a very dangerous idea. Humans are humans and they are worthy of respect…"

"I am interested in the idea that people should be able to define their own happiness. It’s not just about fertility; we are often told that we need this or that to be happy. We need to be thin, rich or whatever. But maybe we should decide for ourselves what happiness looks like."

"“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But when it's in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn't mean it's no longer love.”"

"“Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world when we are gone.”"

"“So love is like a test, but in what sense? To what end? Who was carrying out the test? But I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves.”"

"“I understand how a word others use every day can become something whispered in the dark to soothe a wound that just won't heal. I remember thinking I would never hear it spoken without unravelling a little, wondering if I would ever get to say it in the light. So I recognise the gift in this simple pronouncement, the promise of a beginning in this one word.”"

"“OK, we'll tell her you dug the grave." It's the truth - stretch, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?”"

"“Before you call the snail a weakling, tie your house to your back and carry it around for a week”"

"“It would take a while for me to realise that each of my children had given me as much as they took. My memories of them, bittersweet and constant, were as powerful as a physical presence. And because of that, as a bus bore me into the heart of a city I did not know, while my last child was dying in Lagos and the country was unraveling, I was not afraid because I was not alone.”"

"“I loved Yejide from the very first moment. No doubt about that. But there are things even love can’t do. Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”"

"“The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones that others will remember. Sometimes”"

"“I had expected them to talk about my childlessness. I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles - name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick - and I had them ready. I was ready to listen to them tell me I must do something about my situation. I expected to hear about a new pastor I could visit; a new mountain where I could go to pray; or an old herbalist in a remote village or town whom I could consult. I was armed with smiles for my lips, an appropriate sheen of tears for my eyes and sniffles for my nose. I was prepared to lock up my hairdressing salon throughout the coming week and go in search of a miracle with my mother-in-law in tow. What I was not expecting was another smiling woman in the room, a yellow woman with a blood-red mouth who grinned like a new bride.”"

"“what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits”"

"“But even then, I could trap those thoughts and keep them caged in a corner of my mind, in a place where they could not spread their wings and take over my life.”"

"“I was overwhelmed with the urge to fill every silence with words. Silence to me was a void in the universe that could suck us all in. It was my assignment to block this deadly void with words and save the world.”"

"“But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers. It was convenient to believe my husband was trustworthy; sometimes faith is easier than doubt.”"

"“Already, I was coming undone, like a hastily tied scarf coming loose, on the ground before the owner is aware of it.”"

"“I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles—name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick—and I had them ready.”"

"“I would learn later that Akin could keep himself neatly folded in while he drew out other people. He was the kind of person that many claimed as a dear friend. Many of those people did not even know him, but they never knew they did not know him.”"

"“there is no god like a mother”"

"“Even the tongue and the teeth cannot cohabit without fighting”"

"“The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones others will remember. Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world.”"

"“A mother must be vigilant. She must be able and willing to wake up ten times during the night to feed her baby. After her intermittent vigil, she must see everything clearly the next morning so that she can notice any changes in her baby. A mother is not permitted to have blurry vision. She must notice if her baby’s wail is too loud or too low. She must know if the child’s temperature has risen or fallen. A mother must not miss any signs.”"

"“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break”"

"“Didn’t think it was possible for the world to change so suddenly. I was aware of other people moving up and down the corridor: I heard heels clicking, people speaking, felt some bodies push past mine. But I felt so alone, as though within the space of time it had taken Yejide to say, “They have taken Olamide to the mortuary” I had been transported to a planet with no human life.”"

"“There is nothing stopping a beautiful girl from facing her books”"

"“Now hear me well—what is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it is not yours, it is not yours o.”"

"Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered."

"“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.”"

"Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach."

"“My mother had become a obsession for me, a religion, and the very thought of referring to another woman as Mother seems sacrilegious, a betrayal of the woman who had given up her life for me to live.”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"“Di we ever really know what we will do in any situation until the situation presents itself?”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"“The road stretches before us, shrouded in a darkness transitioning into dawn as it leads me back to you.”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"I don’t want to write trauma for trauma’s sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action."

"It is so critical to understand that speaking up transcends the ability to help just the person speaking up, but knowing that whenever we use our voices, we are doing so for many others who have suffered the same experiences or injustices. It is about starting crucial conversations that would hopefully lead to positive change. It is about refusing to be complacent, to accept what is seen as the norm."

"It’s so heartbreaking that we’re killing talent. We’re killing intelligence. We’re killing future leaders. We’re killing brains, inventors. We’re killing so much by not allowing these girls to be educated."

"When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important."

"You must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well."

"We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well."

"Not his-story. My own will be called her-story."

"“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.“"

"I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all that putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep Him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says--with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness."

"Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense."

"Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? So, I nod my head yes, because it is true, the future is always working, always busy unfolding better things, and even if it doesn’t seem so sometimes, we have hope of it."

"“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice."

"I feel a free that I didn't feel in long time. And when I smile, it climb from inside my stomach and spread itself on my teeth."

"If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than men?"

"Write your truth, Ms. Tia say. Your truth."

"“Your dead mother and me, we are age-mates. God forbid for me to share my husband with my own child. God forbid that I am waiting for you to finish with my husband before I can enter his room. Ah, you will suffer in this house. Ask Khadija, she will tell you that I am a wicked woman. That my madness is not having cure.”"

"“When you begin to born your children, you will not be too sad again,” she say. “When I first marry Morufu, I didn’t want to born children. I was too afraid of having a baby so quick, afraid of falling sick from the load of it. So I take something, a medicine, to stop the pregnant from coming. But after two months, I say to myself, ‘Khadija, if you don’t born a baby, Morufu will send you back to your father’s house.’ So I stop the medicine and soon I born my first girl, Alafia. When I hold her in my hands for the first time, my heart was full of so much love. Now, my children make me laugh when I am not even thinking to laugh. Children are joy, Adunni. Real joy.”"

"She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man.”"

"I am leaving Ikati. This is what I been wanting all my life, to leave this place and see what the world outside is looking like, but not like this. Not with a bad name following me. Not like a person that the whole village is looking for because they think she have kill a woman. Not with one half of my heart with Kayus and the other half with Khadija. I hang my head down, feeling a thick, heavy cloth as it is covering me. The thick cloth of shame, of sorrow, of heart pain."

"When she come out, she draw deep breath and her chest, wide like blackboard, is climbing up and down, up and down. It is as if this woman is using her nostrils to be collecting all the heating from the outside and making us to be catching cold. I am standing beside Mr. Kola, and his body is shaking like my own. Even the trees in the compound, the yellow, pink, blue flowers in the long flowerpot, all of them too are shaking."

"I didn’t tell Ms. Tia that I ever marry Morufu or about all the things he did to me in the room after he drink Fire-Cracker. I didn’t tell her about what happen to Khadija. I didn’t tell her because I have to keep it inside one box in my mind, lock the box, and throw the key inside river of my soul. Maybe one day, I will swim inside the river, find the key."

"I tear to pieces the paper, and throw it to the floor. Then I swim deep inside the river of my soul, find the key from where it is sitting, full of rust, at the bottom of the river, and open the lock. I kneel down beside my bed, close my eyes, turn myself into a cup, and pour the memory out of me."

"“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”"

"But there are words in my head, many things I want to say. I want to tell Ms. Tia I am sorry I made her come here. I want to ask why the doctor didn’t come too. Why didn’t he come and get a beating like his wife? If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?"

"Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?"

"Kike picks up her basket, sets it on her head, leaves it to balance by itself. The girls in our village learn how to do this from when they are first growing two teeth. They know how to use every part of their body to work so that their hand can be free to do even more work."

"“In our land, a sad wife is better than a happy woman with no husband.”"

"That’s the disgusting reality about the human ability to adapt. At first the shock, the repulsion, is all in 3D — sights and sounds and smells. You recoil and gag and wish for a bath and cry at the devastation. Time passes. You live in it. You spend time in it. You blend, and everything fizzles to normalcy, and that which once repulsed slowly becomes natural, acceptable if you do nothing. That, I realize, is what culture is: doing things a certain way until you get used to it."

"“But you were blind to your wife’s depression and silent resentment. She hid it from you because she loved you. And you were blind to it because society offers you that blindfold, that thick cloth of entitlement, patriarchy, at birth.”"

"It was a fact that if Amadioha has insisted on taking a man’s life, no medicine man could do anything about it...”"

"What hurts one man may benefit another” and “a diseased village is a good village to a medicine man”"

"One thing is clear: I shall marry Ihuoma. She is a human being, and if marrying a woman like her is a fatal mistake, I am prepared to make it. If I am her husband for a day before my death my soul will go singing happily to the spirit world. There also I shall be prepared to dare the wrath of four hundred Sea Kings for her sake."

"Ihuoma is the sea-king’s main interest and her male admires are victims of circumstance and of their own misdeeds”"

"No one wanted to betray his admiration. There was silence for a time."

"He reconciles himself to these forces and treats them with reverence and dignity. He believes that his every action is guided and directed by spirits”"

"There are few women like Ihuoma in the world... It is death to marry them and they leave behind a harrowing string of dead husbands. They are usually beautiful, very beautiful but dogged by their invisible husbands of the spirit world. With some spirits marriage is possible if an expert on sorcery is consulted. With the sea-king it is impossible. He is too powerful to be fettered and when he is on the offensive he is absolutely relentless. He unleashes all the powers at his command and they are fatal”"

"It is not changing into the lion that is hard, it is getting the tail of a lion"

"Kolanut last long in the mouths of them who value it."

"When the chameleon brings forth a child, is not that child expected to dance? As we have made you King, act as King."

"When the rain falls on the leopard, does it wash off its spots? Has the richness of kingly life washed off the love of our King for his people?"

"My people. Children of our fathers. Sickness is like rain. Does the rain fall on one roof alone? No. Does it fall on one body and not on another? No. Whoever the rain sees, on him it rains. Does it not? It is the same with sickness."

"It is sickness that man can cure, not death"

"To get fully cured one needs patience. The moon moves slowly but by daybreak it crosses the sky."

"By trying often, the monkey learns to jump from tree to tree without falling."

"The horns cannot be too heavy for the head of the cow that must bear them."

"Until the rotten tooth is pulled out, the mouth must chew with caution."

"When the frog in front falls in pit, others behind take caution."

"You do me great wrong, therefore to think that, like a rock in the middle of a lake, forever cooled by flowing waters, I do not know, and cannot know the sun's hotness that burns and dries up the open land."

"Have I been sleeping? If so, I am sick in the head: for only a madman would go to sleep with his roof on fire."

"Now my people, when trees fall on trees, first the topmost must be removed."

"Me an Ijekun man, a stranger in your tribe [stares at CHIEFS] when crocodiles eat their own egg, what will they not do to the flesh of a frog."

"The hyena flirts with the hen, the hen is happy, not knowing that her death has come."

"If you think you can drum for my downfall, and hope that, drum will sound, then your head is not good."

"If you think like a tortoise you can plot against me without my first cutting you down with my own tortoise tricks, then, fellow, madness is in your liver."

"Your highness, if you think to have heavy suspicion is wisdom, then your head is not well."

"Two rams cannot drink in the same bucket at the same time. They will lock horns."

"If you rise too early the dew of life will soak you."

"A man who cannot control his wife is like a chief who cannot control his subjects."

"When a man's wife is mad, the whole town knows, but when a man is mad, only his wife knows."

"A madman is like a child, he speaks the truth without knowing it."

"When a man's beard is on fire, he does not worry about whose axe is sharp."

"A man who has no respect for his wife is like a farmer who has no respect for his farm."

"Me fight am sojar for Lugard. 1901, we take am Kontagora. West Africa Frontier Force. Me dey 1902 we take am Bauchi, go Borno. Lugard telli me...(patting himself on the back) 'Good man, good man!' 1903 - we take am Kano, take am Sokoto. Lugard make am me Corpul-one rope..."

"What's the man so proud about, fighting to advance British imperialism in Africa? And the two of you sitting there, encouraging such vulgar memories... From the day the White man set foot on our shores! First, Rum to our fathers: to confuse their minds. Then Rifles to shoot ourselves. The aftermath? Ruin. Slavery and external ruin!"

"Some people have started gathering in groups with people of their own kind. That too must stop"

"Multi-lingual interpretation is done concurrently among members of the group [the characters], but in subliminal whispers."

"He says it's not that we don't want to be alive."

"Apprentice barber is sitting on the stool. Nothing to do, he is leafing through the pages of some tattered newspapers…all of which report on Talks – all spices of Talks…On the bench at the other side of the shop the Master Barber himself lies full length, face heavenwards asleep…"

"Poverty has also endeavoured to enlist the usefulness of a hook-up wooden radio and a standing fan - albeit a scrawny and temperamental oddity."

"Large-faced, burly hunk of choice meat and big bones. He is affluently attired although with a touch of the bumpkin."

"He picks up a comb from the table, blows dust and loose hair off it. But as he leans forward with the comb to dig into Man’s hair, Man jerks his head backwards, dodging the Barber’s contact. Barber’s hands halt in mid-air, himself startled."

"Barber’s arm stops in mid-air. It trembles visibly. Man throws his arms up triumphantly. Starts scooping money into his pocket."

"Everything really depends on our vote…any vote cast for a politician tomorrow on the basis of sheer fatherhood by birth; or of brotherhood by clan; or sisterhood by religion, is your doom and my doom."

"The ocean refused to be still; it took more, claimed more, and retreated less but paradoxically the hungry sea left behind more of its unwanted children, its vomit littering Scorpion’s little patch of beach-front: a seagull’s skull, uncapped beer bottles, horse scat, empty packets of cigarettes, the left foot of a size twelve shoe, a dead army of used condoms, and an old deflated football."

"She stared at her reflection in the huge mirror… she hated the sight that greeted her – the large landscape of a forehead, the flared nostrils that were begging for a surgeon’s knife, the puffy lips, the spaced out eyes and the gap between the two incisors, which could clearly accommodate another tooth. She was a monstrosity to look at without make-up."

"A conglomeration of roguishly built shanty homes, it flanked the Sambo creek, a torrid expanse of water twisting like loins to the sea."

"Once you set foot in Underground City, you felt its touch and its breath on you."

"That yellow house wey get green-white-green for doormat and opposite am you go see Mama Sikirat beer parlour or when you reach the end of the street, you go see one plank like bridge wey dey near Holy Ghost Church, cross am and in front you go see the house wey get tap for de front.”"

"He always smiled at their jokes. But, that morning, he was not smiling. His face, made fierce by war paint, glistened with sweat and odium as he raised his machete and brought it down. Bright, red blood, warm and sticky, splashed across Faiza’s face and dotted, in a fine spray, the shell-pink nightdress that her father had bought her."

"Binta fiddled with her fingers. ‘My husband, God rest his soul, was killed by some Christian boys he employed. They were people he called by their birth names and did business with. My sister’s husband and her son were hacked to death by their Christian neighbours because a woman urged them to.”"

"Outside, a bird chirruped short piercing cries, like mocking laughter."

"I can take care of myself."

"Studying the handwriting on the envelope, his eyes lit up in recognition. But then a frown crept across his face and he wondered how a letter simply marked TADUNO—no last name, no address, just Taduno—managed to reach him in a nameless foreign town."

"Build a life elsewhere."

"Did you have to sneak home like a thief in the night?"

"You showed up claiming to be somebody we know. We all see you as a man who has lost his identity—in fact, a man who has lost his mind…"

"What's the difference between a Yanmirin and an animal? Can the offspring of a hen be a duck?"

"Our father and our God, are ask that you cure Anjola of her Yoruba stubbornness! Our merciful father, we know that Yoruba Stubbornness is a serious disease; it is a disease that is difficult to cure but we trust in your supreme power, oh God, because you are the God of Possibilities."

"Inter-ethnic marriage [I]s a weapon of peace and harmonious co-existence among the numerous ethnic groups in Nigeria."

"Don't look at your travails as a north-west problem. It's a national problem. The country needs help."

"You are a fresh graduate with little knowledge of the dynamics of your country. The northerners are good people but you've got to be ready to identify with them, demonstrate that you are a part of them, before you can benefit from their kindness[...] You have to claim to be a northerner to get a job in the north."

"Is it true that Igbo people in Imo are better than those in Anambra? That they are more hospitable, better organised and generally more elevated?"

"The Anambra Igbos are not just good, they are far better than the Imo Igbos.The Anambra people are the genuine and authentic Igbos. Besides, look around you, nearly every great Igbo person in this country is from Anambra - Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chinua Achebe, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Emeka Anyoku; the list is long. You have spent close to one year in Anambra and you have tasted their hospitality. What further proof do you need?"

"When I arrived home... [I] met my mother sitting on the cement slab outside the kitchen door, looking agitated. She said my father had gone out with Ify because Dayo, my immediate elder brother, wanted to make trouble. She said Dayo was categorical in his rejection of Ify because he was Igbo and had threatened to ensure that the marriage never happened... My mother said there was something disturbing about the way he spoke; she said she detected a level of vehemence that was troublesome... Finally, everybody was home and all hell was let loose. Dayo's vituperations astounded me."

"I took a firm decision also not to share my misery with any of my mates because I knew what advice most of then would proffer. They would tell me I had no option but to succumb. They would give me a thousand and one names of students, past and present, who had succumbed; that I should be 'realistic'. And so I kept the matter to myself. I was suffering internally; I was going through agony trying to think of a way out. Nonetheless, I managed to maintain a calm exterior as I went about my other academic activities."

"there are only two things that 'qualify' an individual to even nurse a political ambition in our country... They are money and the strong backing of a godfather."

"When a man is looking... happy..., the woman in his life deserve commendation."

"“hellish” to travel to work in the morning and a “nightmare of intractable traffic and bad roads” in the evening"

"It was home of the legendary CMS Grammar School, the oldest secondary school in the country, as well as Methodist Boys’ High School. It was also home to some movie stars and music icons like Obesere, Olamide, 9ice and Lil Kesh. Prominent tertiary institutions such as the University of Lagos and the Federal College of Education, Technical were just down the road."

"The unfortunate class of homeless Lagosians"

"“‘Oga mi, wole kanle, eleyi gbomo,’” – “My boss, you need to park properly; this passenger has a child with them"

"I’m a Homo habilis”; “the pig and ape that I am”; “Is she not afraid I might stain her, my colour jump onto her like in those monster horror films?"

"White like chalk. So white, unlike Father McMahon, who our evil sun has turned to a red man."

"The x of the equation is that there’s a blonde here in Kontagora, a platinum blonde if I’ll believe Isaiah."

"Marilyn Monroe who has never had mosquitoes sing in her ears and suck her blood, leaving red swellings as they fly away. A Princess Diana who has never woken up at midnight with hunger. A Taylor Swift who has never experienced a blackout."

"...whites are so rich that they can wipe their anuses with money."

"Her handwriting, tbh, is like the prints of a hen digging for food, i.e. barely legible."

"..writes as clearly and sweetly as Hillary Clinton."

"Makoko is what the outsiders had originally called our settlement hundreds of years ago, due to its abundance of akoko leaves, and the name stuck for the community on the Lagos coast just across from the Third Mainland Bridge. To strangers, it’s a slum, a metallic and wooden eyesore built over a stinking bed of ever-mounting sewage, spreading out across the smoke-filled horizon. For the government, it’s the impediment between even larger coffers for them and prime waterfront real estate. But to us, who are from here, Makoko is simply home."

"The Nigerian government likes to pretend that we don’t exist, but we’ve been here for hundreds of years, our wooden houses resting proudly on their stilts above Lagos’s charcoal-coloured lagoon. We’ll remain here for some time, no matter how many attempts they make to push us out."

"A person must have many other lives on Makoko in order to eat and sleep."

"Parents dream of us leaving Makoko and doing better than they did for them- selves, and eventually we dream it too, all the while knowing it to be an elusive fantasy."

"...Not many of us have done it, yet that hope pulses within us like a beacon."

"An award is a landmark for any writer, because it shows that it is a measure of a standard that you have improved in your writing."

"work on every genre of literature from fiction to poetry, non-fiction and drama. I do work more on some than the others. My dominant focus, for instance, is mostly fiction and poetry. Recently though, I compiled a non-fiction anthology called Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians. Of all the genres, I enjoy poetry the most. It gives me a space to condense my words and say a lot in a very limited space. It challenges me to utilize figures of speech, imagery and mood to capture my thought and ideas. I also like non-fiction because there is urgency about it. It almost feels as if I am documenting narratives live, as they happen. At the moment, I am working on a critical paper about how films/documentaries can be used as an effective tool of activism for the African LGBTQ activist. Additionally, I am editing and polishing my second collection of poetry collection entitled Brutal Bliss."