Nadifa Mohamed

"....the weapons were pens, books, chalks and blackboards, the heroes simple teachers."

"Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say."

"It is the kind of place where human skeletons might sink into the soil undisturbed and unmourned."

"In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that passed through her. She never picked the fruit that fell from them, believing it a kind of cannibalism, but out of those soft, unshaped figures had grown tall, strong, tough-barked trees that blossomed and called birds to their branches and clambered out over the orchard walls to the world beyond."

"In the centre of the city where the alleys narrow at points to the width of a man’s shoulder blades, you can walk as if in a dream, never certain of what might appear after the next bend:..."

"The place has enchantment, mystery, it moves backward and forward in time with every turn of the feet; it is fitting that it lies beside an ocean over which its soul can breathe, rather than being hemmed in by mountains like a jinn in a bottle."

"They have created a man – no, a Frankenstein’s monster – and branded it with his name before setting it loose."

"Standing there, shoulders sagging, in the Law Courts, in Cardiff, in Bilad al-Welsh, he feels the blows of their lies like a man shot with arrows."

"They're doing this because they haven't broken me. If I had lost my mind and sat weeping in my own shit, maybe then they'd be happy to send me to a madhouse like they did with Khaireh."

"....I stand and claim my innocence so they have to finish me to protect themselves. Their lies and evil end with me."

"They say we got you by the balls, darkie! We own your land, your trains, your riv­ers, your schools, the coffee grains at the bottom of your cup. You see what they do to the Mau Mau and all the Kikuyu in Kenya? Lock them up, man and child."

"...look around you, this is the jungle, you got bushes and trees everywhere, in my country nothing grows."

"You are a perpetual motion machine."

"This shop is my life, and if I had just sold it in '48 what good would that have done? A widow, a spinster, and a little girl, jumping from home to home and job to job."