"Scheherazade possessed courage, wit, and penetration. She had read much, and had so admirable a memory, that she never forgot any thing she had read. She had successfully applied herself to philosophy, medicine, history, and the liberal arts; and her poetry excelled the compositions of the best writers of her time. Besides this, she was a perfect beauty, and all her accomplishments were crowned by solid virtue.""

"Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be."

"Aladdin had won the hearts of the people by his gentle bearing. He was made captain of the Sultan's armies, and won several battles for him, but remained as courteous as before, and lived thus in peace and content for several years.""

"Sindbad then gave him a hundred sequins, and henceforward counted him among his friends; also he caused him to give up his profession as a porter, and to eat daily at his table that he might all his life remember Sindbad the Sailor.""

"Since I must die,' he said, 'before I choose the manner of my death, I conjure you on your honour to tell me if you really were in that vase?'""

"Spare me and Allah will spare thee; slay me not or Allah shall slay thee.”"

"Some see Akhenaten a betrayer of the people’s trust, an Oedipal adulterer, and his wife Nefertiti conniving, unloving, and disloyal"

"They were fighting for a cause that they didn't understand, for a war that they didn't believe in."

"It is true, Prince Ahmed, the princess my niece is obliged to your artificial apple for her cure, but let me ask you, whether you could have been so serviceable to her if you had not known by Prince Ali's tube the danger she was in, and if Prince Houssain's carpet had not brought you to her so soon?"

"That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins."

"“Life is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions”"

"I want to cry now, not later! I want to be the first because if I cry after the others how will we know that I cried too?"

"I said no more, but the flames of rage continued to burn inside me.....Why should we protect those who contributed to our own destruction?""

"A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil”"

"When the white people came to Africa, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed: when we opened them, the white people had the land and we had the Bible."

"it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters"

"singing in the old-fashioned language of this good-hearted man, who sold us Hope at the lowest possible price,"

"Those who followed Akhenaten to the end seemed to believe in conscience, they believed in God before and despite of His weak messenger"

"A fly’s not a bird just because it can fly."

"The second man was not sure; be blamed fate. “It was in the name,” he said. “Who would name his child first Kamu and then Kintu?”“Someone seeking to double the curse."

"Kintu felt for Gitta. He knew the snare of being a man. Society heaped such expectations on manhood that in a bid to live up to them some men snapped..."

"I’m nothing, I’m everything,’ he declared. ‘The street is my mother. The sun is my father. What more should I ask of life?”"

"My view is that they came on earth, did their thing and now they have bowed out. Who is to say that things are not right?"

"It means he’s read a lot of books.’ ‘Listen to that, a doctor of books! What use is that to this village?"

"for Nefertiti, “beauty and brilliance combined,” who believes in his cause and does everything she can to stand by her husband"

"The mind was a curse: its ability to go back in time to regret and hop into the future to hope and worry was not a blessing"

"The sweetness of honey does not soothe the bee sting."

"Though many brave men had sought him out in times of pressing need, the war patriarch had failed to earn their affection. A few of the people he had so diligently served had conspired to put him out of service in the most hideous ways."

"The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values shunning westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern the vivid colours of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral."

"But on the ground, history looks nothing like this clash of nations and empires and states, however true and valid such stories may be on their terms; on the ground, history is the accumulated prejudices, hopes, and superstitions that we carry even if we don’t understand how we acquired them, everything we don’t know that makes us who we are."

"“Though the uprising had freed the vassals from any obligations they might have had to their former masters, it had yet to profit them. In fact, as the villagers had to man their new borders, build their own prisons, police their markets, and look after the judges they appointed, the amount of money that went to communal use steadily increased."

"She accepted that one shall not kill one's neighbor, unless it is to encourage others to do the same; one shall not steal, unless one can prove oneself lord-designate; and one shall show deference to an elder, unless it is decidedly evident that the elder is from one of the nine fallen ethnic groups."

"Land was to the nomads what a deity is to the initiated: one may draw on its might, but not lay claim to it. Amma herdsmen roamed the vast steppe at will in search of a green pasture and watering hole, with little regard for man-made boundaries."

"History is a fabric of memories and fear and forgetting, of longing and nostalgia, of invention and re-creation. History is bunk, and sometimes it’s a good thing it is."

"They questioned why a settled society should behave any differently, why one man should toil in the service of another merely because the stronger had staked out something that had never belonged to him in the first place."

"Well,what does this artistic sincerity and integrity matter? What matters is the cause"

"It is the stale breath of Death on his open and vulnerable neck that immortalizes the hero, that lends a fireside story its luster."

"Aster had come to trust the diviner implicitly. The lessons had burned such an indelible mark in her memory that she could recount, with the utmost ease, all twenty-three creatures that had fallen from the grace of God, and the nine ethnic groups that the Almighty had meant to be slaves."

"One can believe that Akhenaten was indeed a “mouse that fancied himself a lion”"

"They were killing each other for no reason, for a piece of land that didn't matter."

"In the media, an avalanche of negative images of an Africa quickly sinking into anarchy so soon after independence overwhelmed him. Horror stories were broadcast with glee and broke the resolve of so many black activists."

"I wanted to see this black man who was but a voice, a black power, and whose military genius was recognised even by our enemy.""

"I believe we can save the donkey and save the community.""

"A group started singing a few native cultural songs...And they would burst out laughing and clapping at the daring of their voices. There were also a few Swahili and English ones. It was a truly culturally integrated party and Munira lost courage. He merely stood at the door, eaten by indecision..."

"For there are many questions about our history which remain unanswered. Our present day historians, following on similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism, insist we only arrived here yesterday."

"We must always be ready to plant the seed in these last days before His second coming. All the signs—strife, killing, wars, blood—are prophesied here.’"

"Christian, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity."

"Karega and his following of Theng'eta factory workers were not any different: they had rejected it is true mere brotherhood of the skin, region, and community of origins and said no to both black and white and Indian employers of labour. But they too would fail: because they had also rejected the most important brotherhood—the only brotherhood—of religion, of being born anew in the Lord of the universe and of the eternal kingdom."

"We went on a journey to the city to save Ilmorog from the drought. We brought back spiritual drought from the city...""