"She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks."

"Typical Igbo psychology; men never do wrong, only the women; they have to beg for forgiveness, because they are bought, paid for and must remain like that, silent, obedient slaves."

"The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins."

"She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost."

"Marriage is lovely when it works, but if it does not, should one condemn oneself ? I stopped feeling guilty for being me."

"One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers?"

"She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements."

"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?"

"Dreams soon assume substance"

"The leaves were still on the trees but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off."

"Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World."

"Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience."

"But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We, women, subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.”"

"Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us."

"I work toward the liberation of women but I'm not a feminist. I'm just a woman."

"The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too."

"It was something like pain and different from pain."

"Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman..."

"If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man."

"I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold"

"You can’t nice your way to being loved."

"Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time."

"How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind."

"The frequent flare of sad longing."

"I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone."

"Tears were so cheap now"

"Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:"

"They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done."

"Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation."

"He would kill you, but he would do it slowly"

"I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces."

""I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously."

"I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace."

"Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man"

"Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing"

"It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be."

"Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold."

"When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain."

"sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason."

"my dark day further darkened."

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

"was suspended in a place of no feeling,"

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

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

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

"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?"

"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."

"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 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?"