"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."

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

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

"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.""

"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,"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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?"

"was suspended in a place of no feeling,"

"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."

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

"my dark day further darkened."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Tears were so cheap now"

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

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

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

"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."

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

""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 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."

"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."

"The frequent flare of sad longing."

"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."

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

"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."

"trans women are trans women"

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