"Parents dream of us leaving Makoko and doing better than they did for them- selves, and eventually we dream it too, all the while knowing it to be an elusive fantasy."

"The Nigerian government likes to pretend that we don’t exist, but we’ve been here for hundreds of years, our wooden houses resting proudly on their stilts above Lagos’s charcoal-coloured lagoon. We’ll remain here for some time, no matter how many attempts they make to push us out."

"A person must have many other lives on Makoko in order to eat and sleep."

"Makoko is what the outsiders had originally called our settlement hundreds of years ago, due to its abundance of akoko leaves, and the name stuck for the community on the Lagos coast just across from the Third Mainland Bridge. To strangers, it’s a slum, a metallic and wooden eyesore built over a stinking bed of ever-mounting sewage, spreading out across the smoke-filled horizon. For the government, it’s the impediment between even larger coffers for them and prime waterfront real estate. But to us, who are from here, Makoko is simply home."

"I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this “genre” has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored."

"no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That’s why I prefer books to people."

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)"

"Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman."

"In a way, I feel survival is always my subject matter."

"(Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?) All time — Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived...My favorite novelist working today is our greatest living writer, Toni Morrison. Nothing compares with her lyrical, heart-wrenching, gorgeous prose."

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

""We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)"

"I always think it helps not to think about anyone reading your work, but to write what you would want to read."

"What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life."

"Other people’s judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something."

"It's so easy for me—and probably other writers—to write something and think, "This is garbage, I'm throwing it out." But if you give yourself time, you can write your way into the story. So I try not to read it until I have about 50 pages. Then I feel like I have enough distance, and I'm not as highly critical of myself."

"For people who want to be a writer—and maybe this is true for anything you want to be in life—if one person believes in you, that's enough. And my grandmother really believed in me."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"For me, reading and magic always went together...For me, literature and magic have always gone together in terms of subject matter but also in what literature does to a reader – it casts a magic spell."

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

"I think it's bad for writers to think too much about what their themes are, or to over-intellectualize their own work. I think it is much better for readers to think about that. They are not defensive, so they usually understand it at a different level, a purer level. I don't want to understand it too thoroughly. I just want to do it."

"What you dream, you can grow."

"The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other."

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story."

"It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world."

"I think that I always wanted to tell the stories of women who were not able to tell their own stories."

"I didn't believe in writers block until I had it. After 9/11 I couldn't write and the way I got out of it was to read one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury...(Why couldn't you write after 9/11?) AH: I was so depressed and hopeless about the state of the world. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451, a book about how important books are, I was reminded of the reason to write."

"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you've never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. (first lines)"

"The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)"

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul. (p348)"

"That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option."

"He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth."

"The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be."

"For me—and I think for most writers—you're a reader first and then it just happens. You so love it that you want to be part of it, and you start writing."

"(Have you noticed a change in the industry toward women writers since you began writing?) AH: I don't think women are treated the same as men in anything, so why would they be treated the same in literature? I think that there's a different standard, and it's difficult for women, even though, weirdly, it's women who read the most fiction. I don't know what the right word for it is, but I think that some women writers are not looked at with the same kind of respect or seriousness."

"“For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless,” she said. “It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn’t care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn’t need to be rescued.”"