"I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far. Less and less of God, and more and more of man It is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike."

"She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it."

"Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!"

"I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman."

"Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse."

"“Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was. “That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.”"

"People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe."

"Infinite Wisdoms caution against talking to unmasked women, against even looking at them. They may be demons in disguise."

"Red is the color of sanctity. It’s the color pure girls will bleed when Elder Durkas tests them."

"They enrich themselves by your suffering—parasites, quite literally draining the blood from you."

"If I asked you to catch me the moon with your bare hands, how would you do it?" she asked suddenly. Adil closed his eyes, and Karina could not stop staring at the way the gold light illuminated his dark skin. When the moon began to set, I'd wait with my hands beneath it until it sank right into them. And then I'd turn around and give it to you. He turned to his side and gave Karina a shy smile. But that's a stupid answer, isn't it?"

"I don't think you're weak for being scared. I don't think you could be as strong as you are if you weren't."

"The best way to honor them would be to take them with her toward whatever lay on the other side of that marvelous sunrise."

"Teach me what you know."

"The people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay."

"Life is full of cheaters [...] If you're playing fair, you're not playing to win."

"You tear yourself down for things you could not have known or done... why punish a seed for not yet being a tree."

"This is my mind. I am the strongest person here."

"The pain you have endured does not justify the pain you inflict on others."

"Nothing good can come of a place that refuses to see the pain of the people on whose backs it was built."

"First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one."

"The past devours those naive enough to forget it."

"....to aid even one person is to save an entire world."

"The Magistrate mapped the city through the music he listened to, each song a landmark in the labyrinth of his mind."

"They think we come from the jungle. They think we have kangaroo courts. They will say, 'How can you practice law here when you couldn't even preserve the rule of law in your own country?'"

"The Maestro often wondered if he was retreating into madness or finding solace in the silence of his books."

"Such a strange and haunting debut! Attia's spellbinding sentences and wonderful characters draw you into a story unlike any other. This is an author to watch"

"But if there's one thing I've learnt in the last few years, it's that everyone needs a story. That's all our lives amount to, nothing but stories that we hope will live on after we are gone."

"The thing is, every time I go back, I feel more and more like a stranger. The lingo's changed, the bearer notes have more zeros, the whole vibe, the way people do things is completely different."

"Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours."

"There's only one secret to being a successful hairdresser and I've never withheld it from anyone. Your client should leave the salon feeling like a white woman."

"To be dispensable is a woman's worst nightmare and I was beginning to live it."

"I have told this to everyone who's ever asked me and what they all want to know is how d'you make someone feel like a white woman? The answer is simple, Whiteness is a state of mind."

"Men don’t take rejection so well. It’s like they’re raised expecting that they can have whatever they want."

"I can only say that friendship should rise above man-made laws, which tend to be capricious by their very nature."

"Something about the elderly altered the character of a place, civilized it, creating a bridge between past and present, a sense of continuity across generations."

"Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens."

"It’s difficult to stop loving someone, even when they have done something that you once thought unforgivable. There isn’t an on off switch for love."

"Performed a juju which changed me to a horse unexpectedly, then he put reins into my mouth and tied me on a stump with a thick rope."

"When there was no palm-wine for me to drink I started to drink ordinary water which I was unable to taste before, but I did not satisfy with it as palm-wine."

"This old man was not really a man, he was a god and he was eating with his wife when I reached there . . . I myself was a god and juju-man."

"By and by, this lady followed the Skull to his house, and the house was a hole in the ground."

"So, I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who afterwards reduced to a "Skull" and the lady became my wife since that day. This is how I got a wife."

"I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’ because it was at that time I noticed carefully that my father married three wives as they were doing in those days, if it is not common nowadays."

"The brave new world that they had fought for had very easily faded into a rotten world of unemployment and frustration."

"The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living."

"Alo is a lie!"

"Are not thousands of these heroes still roaming about Lagos and the Provinces in search of the wherewithals of life?"

"Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too” (Palm-Wine Drinkard."

"As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”"