"As an individual I’m attracted to strong female characters – my characters have always been people who own themselves. Even if they’re strongly doing something wrong, they’ve always been powerful people."

"Tears were so cheap now"

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

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

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

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment."

"Her silence bruised the air between us."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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 grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him"

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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 began to cry. Tears were so cheap now. How do some memories insist on themselves?"

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

"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?"

"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 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."

"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?"

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

"What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?"

"The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy"

"was suspended in a place of no feeling,"

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