Chinelo Okparanta

"In all the ways he can love you, I promise to love you better. I suppose it's the way we are, humans that we are."

"I suppose it’s the way we are, humans that we are. Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else’s tragedy. Though it is true, too, that sometimes it's hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs."

"Love - the greatest connection to humanity when everything else is falling apart."

"With a man, life is difficult. Without a man, life is even more difficult."

"Hardly have I finished speaking the words, and she vanishes, the way that people sometimes do, even from our minds."

"Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness."

"Let peace be. Let life be."

"I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world."

"Sometimes we get confused about what happiness really means. Sometimes we get confused about what path to take to get to happiness."

"There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no."

"The fact that the Bible says [homosexuality is] bad is all the reason you need. Besides, how can people be fruitful and multiply if they carry on in that way?"

"I knew the truth all the same: that she was doing it for her own good…she was doing it because she was overwhelmed: by life, by the war, by the thought of having to try and make it without Papa."

"At the window, only one glass pane remained in its frame, and on it, cracks in an almost circular pattern, as if a spider web had been stretched across its surface. She went up to that pane, touched it, stroked its fissures with her fingers, stared accusingly at it."

"I was thinking of the ways in which I could dance or fast or pray this sadness away when Mama spoke."

"Papa and Mama were only children, no siblings, which they liked to say was one of the reasons they cherished each other: that they were, aside from me, the only family they had left."