"Yu nivver notice dey interview rooms didn’t have no windows? Me swear to yu, dat man’s ooman mus kept her legs cross for da last ten years, de way he took me up on me offer. An it wasn’t jus on de one day, mind. It took de man four interviews fore he was certain me papers was in order.”"

"“[t]each him to check the external”"

"master[s] his suffering” of his beatings from Thierno"

"At least, the present was simple. But there was a depth of secret activity in him like that in his mind like that long, low line of black, boiling cloud. There was a clear blue sky in his mind that calmly awaited the storm in this heart that calmly as the storm in his and when all had been said and done, this earth would be washed clean of all the things he hated. He slowly continues his walk home, his gaze turned toads the horizon. It was very beautiful.”"

"The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts."

"Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man."

"There had never been a time in his life when he had not thought a thought and felt it immediately bound to the deep center of the earth, then bound back to his heart again—with a reply. Previously, the stillness with which he held himself together to hear the reply had always been disrupted by people. People were horrible to him because they imagined that their thoughts and deeds were concealed when he could see and hear everything, even their bloodstreams and the beating of their hearts. If they knew all that he knew, would they not have torn him to shreds some time ago, to keep the world the way it was when secrets and evil had the same names?”"

"a king in their society”"

"Maybe life had presented him with too many, destinies, but he knew that he would accept them all and fulfill them. Who else had been born with such clear, sharp eyes that cut through all pretense and sham? Who else was a born leader of men, yet at the same time acted out his own, strange inner perceptions, independent of the praise or blame of men?"

"The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kinship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts. He had planned for that loathing in secret; they had absorbed the shocks in secret. When everything was exposed, they had only one alternative: to keep their prejudice and pretend Maru had died."

"When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence."

"(Narrator, p. 151)"

"They were going to get the room they were asking for. Pa Noble was too old for Sue."

"It feels like either you are coming with me or I am staying with you"

"(Narrator, p. 93)"

"There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham."

"Hunger drove Francis to work as a clerical officer in the post office. Adah's hopes rose. This might save the marriage after all."

"One might think on this evidence that Africans treated their children badly. But to Adah’s people and to Adah herself, this was not so at all; it was the custom. Children, especially girls, were taught to be very useful very early in life, and this had its advantages. For instance, Adah learned very early to be responsible for herself. Nobody was interested in her for her own sake, only in the money she would fetch, and the housework she could do and Adah, happy at being given this opportunity of survival, did not waste time thinking about its rights or wrongs. She had to survive.”"

"It never stopped the tin cans rattling, but it kept the victim of the tin cans sane. No one by shouting, screaming or spitting could un-Bushman her. There was only one thing left, to find out how bushmen were going to stay alive on the earth, because no one wanted them to, except perhaps as the slaves and down-trodden dogs of the Batswana. That half she would be left alone to solve."

"Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?"

"(Narrator, p. 166)"

"Her children were going to be different. They were all going to be black, they were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed."

"(Narrator, p. 53)"

"Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away."

"You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”"

"Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why, then did they claim to be superior?"

"(Narrator, p. 141)"

"The African Adventure Lives On…You can do it! The ultimate safari or expedition with leaders who know Africa."

"I am the middle one, the girl, and my little brother clung against my stomach with his arms round my neck and his legs round my waist like a baby monkey to its mother."

"I don’t know what day it was; there was no school, no church any more in our village, so you didn’t know whether it was a Sunday or a Monday."

"There is nothing. No home”"

"London, having killed Adah's congregational God, created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive."

"(Chapter 2, Page 19)"

"At such times he would think, 'What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?' A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her."

"[w]hen we look at them it is as if we are in a real house, with no war, no away"

"(Chapter Eight )"

"Save [Little Bee] and there’s a whole world of them behind her. A whole swarm of Little Bees, coming here to feed.”"

"The boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes."

"I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzzing of the fax machines, and the fluid chatter of the editorial girls on their phones to fashion houses. It all seemed suddenly insane, like wearing a little green bikini to an African war."

"I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie"

"The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden."

"(Chapter Seven)"

"(Chapter nine)"

"Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. […] When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten."

"(Chapter Five)"

"I think [Andrew] truly started to believe that Britain was sinking in to the sea. […] Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy."