"We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask…"

"Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing …"

"It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she …"

"People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival"

"...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys,…"

"She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was ragin…"

"There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair"

"Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to…"

"Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends"

"There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, …"