"Zirigu, now you better shut up your mouth before you annoy me. Since when did you start teaching me how to do my marketing? This is my job. A woman’s job."

"I am a griot. It is I, Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté and Djeli Kedian Kouyaté, master in the art of eloquence since time immemorial the Kouyaté clan have been in the service of the Keita princes of Mali; we are vessels of speech, we are the repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old. The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations. I derive my knowledge from my father Djeli Kedian, who also got it from his father.”"

"Will the smell of the wet soil be too much for your delicate nostrils?"

"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!"

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

"He's a die-hard rogue / Sworn against our progress."

"Will you make me / A laughing-stock?"

"You are as stubborn / As an illiterate goat."

"Be a modern wife, look me in the eye / And give me a little kiss."

"Freduagymen"

"Yaba Badoe"

"I am greater than ... the living god among men."

"Since Mama wouldn't let them visit us, he was spending time with them for a change. Of course there wasn't another woman! Mama was being neurotic, overwrought."

"My father must have realised that his marriage wasn't going to survive. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to leave. But there's never a good time to leave a grief-stricken wife."

"She hates it it when Pa has girlfriends. She says some men can't help themselves. Then she cries, and when she stops crying, she says they're weak - like children."

"So, instead of abandoning us, Pa did the next best thing: he avoided my mother as much as possible, staying away for days on end."

"Yes, some fathers are like that, ... It drives my mother crazy. Does Isobel go crazy as well?'"

"'Yeah. She doesn't understand Peter like I do. 'Just like my mother.' 'Yeah?'"

"Dismissing her accusations of infidelity, he claimed she was imagining things; he was staying overnight with relatives."

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

"He left her to me. And for that I can never forgive him."

"...a divorce will have a really bad effect on Daddy’s preaching"

"there is nothing to be said"

"cannot walk among other women with her head uplifted and straight"

"...all know how I was treated in my marriage. Why should Icry? For what? For my broken ribs? For my baby, the one he killed inside me while beating me? For what"

"woman can be defined by her consciousness of her own femininity no more than by saying that she is a female, for she acquires this consciousness under circumstances dependent on the society of which she is a member"

"it was her fault that her husband looked at other women, It was her fault that her husband beat her"

"Well, I'm sorry you all feel uncomfortable about mybehaviour, but I cannot pretend. I cannot lie to myself and everybody else in this village"

"The wig. Ah, the wig. They say it is made of artificial fibre. Others swear that if it is not gipsy hair, then it is Chinese. Extremists are sure they are made from the hairs of dead white folk – this one gave her nightmares, for she had read somewhere, a long time ago, about Germans making lampshades out of Jewish people’s skins"

"when life fails you, it fails you totally"

"But I was a teacher, and I went the white man’s way"

"That it was so much easier for them to talk about the beauty of being oneself."

"can be questioned and challenged when … [they] reinforce gender inequality and other fundamental right"

"As for imitating white women, mm, what else can one do, seeing how some of our brothers behave? The things one has seen with one’s own eyes. The stories one has heard. About African politicians and diplomats abroad."

"Please, Chicha, I always know you are just making fun of me, but please, promise me won’t take Kwesi away with you.”"

"One’s yams reflect the sum total of one’s life. And mine look wretched enough.”"

"and then as a student of economics, she would also try to remember some other truths she knew about Africa"

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

"My daughter, when life fails you, it fails you totally. One's yams reflect the total sum of one's life."

"A goalkeeper is a dubious character in infant soccer. He is either a good goalkeeper and that is why he is at the goal, which is usually difficult to know in a child, or he is a bad player."

"Even that was not the whole story. Suddenly, it seemed as if all the girls and women she knew and remembered as having smooth black skins had turned light-skinned."