"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?"