"Aren't they the real bedbugs, / Local watchmen for the foreign robbers? / When they see a poor man’s property their mouths water, / When they get their own, their mouths dry up! / Don’t they have any lands / They can share with these foreigners / Whom they have invited back into the country / To desecrate the land?"

"Go and fetch water from the drum outside, / You know the one near the pig-sty."

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

"I had remained sitting on my horse while I talked to him, to accentuate that he was not a guest in the house, for I did not want him in to dine with me."

"Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being."

"Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope."

"Sorry!I shall marry when I want.Nobody will force me into it!"

"Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag."

"Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why."

"What do you want to do with that title-deed? / Why do you always gaze at it / As if it was a title for a thousand ares."

"Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction."

"The first queen spared the life of her brother, reasoning that a good ruler must be willing to die for the people and show mercy when needed. It’s a beautiful story . . . but this is an ugly day. There will be no mercy from me."

"Revenge is a poison, Dèmi. Drink it and you can destroy your enemies, but you will die long before you see them take their last breaths."

"Just because we donʼt understand others doesnʼt mean they deserve our ridicule or hatred."

"the new global economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models"

"These little boys, who wandered about on the farm in the company of their fathers' herds of goats and sheep, looking up grazing for them, did in a way form a link between the life of my civilized house and the life of the wild."

"Fear is a strange master. It makes monsters from the simplest of me."

"I make myself a promise then—never again. I will never live so powerlessly, shackle myself, for people who wouldnʼt even care if I die tonight."

"Poverty has no heroes, / He who judges knows not how he will be judged."

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

"My father once told me that truth has many faces, mouths that help us see more clearly. But justice has only one face—a sword for those who warrant it, whether they be the victims of yesterday or the victors of today."

"As the women for whose image she sewed were inclined to take someone outside their social circle into confidences about their lives she was herself beguiled in turn to confess"

"what better way to make claim to a new country"

"are products of a profound sense of entitlement"

"had more women coming to be clothed by her” than she could accommodate"

"The second sense whites moving in on the blacks’ country”"

"Then he slapped me. I was used to my father beating my mother. He did it almost with a nonchalance that came from regular practice and confidence in her perpetual surrender. But I am not my mother. I slapped Victor ― so hard, my wrist almost snapped and the pain volted up my arm."

"to make a living any way he can"

"They will ask me when I first knew I was in love with you. I will sign and say I don't know. It happened in fragments, piece by piece, separate moments over the years."

"Moments - that's how I remember it. They will be surprised when I say you are the only man I have ever loved."

"the money she was bringing in eased some of the stringencies in their life"

"who had no more schooling than in a small Hungarian town picked up the language easily,” and “taught how to sew in accordance with the strict requirements of a female role imposed by her grandmother,” is able to solicit clients for whom she made dresses"

"thirty-three when you had your first orgasm. It wasn’t from Idris. But, call it serendipity, it was Idris who introduced you to him. He was a beautiful man. Dimpled"

"But you didn’t say you cried mostly because, after considering the darkness of your Allen Avenue days and the deep dissatisfaction of your marriage, sometimes you were overwhelmed with gratitude that you were the lucky mother to two beautifully perfect boys. They were the best and purest things in your life, a nod to God and his mysterious ways."

"Misery loves company, dear.” She was also fond of asking rhetorically, “Why spend your money when you can spend his?”"

"But I should have known that any man who could keep a clean white shirt at the end of a Lagos work day would be dangerous."

"Maybe it’s fast because I have been waiting so long for something good to happen to me."

"You liked me so much I had no choice but to start liking myself, to start acting respectable, like someone who had something special waiting for them back home"

"Lukumon, please tell your family why you made me sleep with another man for money, but treated me like a leper when I returned. Explain why you refused to take the job the man offered you, but you insisted that I took the money, rent this house, and buy you that stupid watch."

"He is ashamed and at the same time angrily resentful that she is seeing it it will be an image of His county,his people what he comes from and what he really is"

"She is ashamed of her parents he thinks she is ashamed of him ,neither knows either about the other"

". You are not there I am not there to see it is a traffic tangle in the streets , hands going up in capability, surrender,owing this open to publicity is not the spectacle available late-night on adult TV"

"She became stiff and clipped with anger. Nobody has to be responsible for me.i am responsible for myself . For yourself always yourself. You think that is very brave .I must tell you something. You only know how to be responsible for yourself here this place your cafe friends your country where you have everything,I can't be responsible I don't want it"

"there is anyway no discription that is the discription.everyone who sees a different face the face he sees is the definitive face for the present situation.the two tickets he holds in his hands turns over ,unfolds verifies materialize a face,her face for him that didn't exist before ,the face for what's impossible can't be"

"But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another."

"He was amazingly different from Lukumon—savvier, kinkier, unselfish."