"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."

"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,"

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

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

"Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing."

"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."

"In my head, there was a queue of emotions I could not name, wanting to be tried out one after the other."

"A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear."

"Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife."

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

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

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

"How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life."

"Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind just cannot."

"And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved."

"Her silence bruised the air between us."

"Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language."

"I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present."

"For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there."

"How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?"

"It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed."

"Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved."

"“I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being.”"

"“Women in general are more likely to have richer interior lives and are also socialized to just sort of embrace more complexity emotionally.”"

"“Writing fiction is the love of my life. It's the thing that I think gives me meaning.”"

"“I’ve always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind. ... No, no, no. I said what I believe.”"

"“Social media has reshaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest.”"

"“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more.”"

"“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”"

"“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”"

"“I feel that I have been fortunate to have found success, and I also want the young writers to have what I did not have when I was starting out my writing career … Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum; we talk about politics, everything.”"

"“Feminism for me is about justice; it’s about the idea that all human beings are equal… Feminism just means equality of opportunity.”"

"“I am not apologetic for being a Nigerian. I won’t apologise for it; it’s who and what I am.”"

"(Whose writing today most inspires you?) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work — both fiction and nonfiction..."

"Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not available to the rest of us. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strength."

"Chinua Achebe was a real education for me, a real education."

"He has begun to resuscitate and reinstate the past, the precolonial era. I'm thinking of Arrow of God, which to my mind is perhaps the best novel to come out of Africa. I think it is an absolutely wonderful novel. And if you look at that novel, it really has almost nothing to do with the impact of the white man. It is about black life, black civilization, before the period of conquest. The period of conquest is just on the horizon, so to speak. But there are not many people who have tackled that kind of theme. There are not many black writers who have done it yet."

"I rank Achebe very highly, especially his Arrow of God, and I consider it a tragedy that he has had to live under such disturbed conditions and writes so little."

"Achebe is a great writer. He is the father of our English literature. You can't take that away from him. His work is highly original. When I was doing my degree here, I used Arrow of God, which I think is his best work. But the critics seem to think everything should be like Things Fall Apart. Everytime you want to read Achebe, you feel you want to study it as literature. You don't pick it up as though you want to enjoy the literature. That is why for a very, very long time, if you went to the African Writers Series, you had the feeling that this is not for the common people."

"When I read Things Fall Apart which is about an Ibo tribe in Nigeria, a tribe I never saw, a system-to put it that way or a society, the rules of which were a mystery to me, I recognized everybody in it. And that book was about my father. How we got over I don't know, we did!""

"I do reread novels I love, like Chinua Achebe’s “Arrow of God,” to remind myself of what fiction can do."

"Camara Laye’s The Dark Child and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because they gave me a glorious shock of recognition. Until I read them, I was not consciously aware that people who looked like me could exist in books. I grew up in a Nigerian university town, and all the books I read before then were foreign children’s books with white characters doing unfamiliar things."

"There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed."

"The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations."

"Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world."

"Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform."

"People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience."

"There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless."