"I realized in no place else in the world would a story like this with an ending like that be possible other than the United States of America, the greatest nation in the world,"

"We all cried and jumped for joy""

"I started making phone calls...I started calling Mogadishu, the airport" ([16:30])"

"There's just so much that one person can take""

"It was just incredible...I felt whole"

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

"....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."

"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."

"Every 11 seconds a little girl is being mutilated somewhere in the world, it has nothing to do with religion, culture or tradition but against all rights of humanity its a crime its cruel its unacceptable."

"“nothing to be done, except go see them. I also knew they”"

"“Many friends have expressed concern that a religious fanatic will try to kill me when I go to Africa. After all, I’ll be speaking out against a crime many fundamentalists consider a holy practice. I’m sure my work will be dangerous, and I admit to being scared…. But my faith tells me to be strong, that God led me down this path for a reason. He has work for me to do. This is my mission. And I believe that long before the day I was born, God chose the day I will die, so I can’t change that. In the meantime, I might as well take a chance, because that’s what I’ve done all my life.”"

"Women’s loyalty has to be earned with trust and affection, rather than barbaric rituals. The time has come to leave the old ways of suffering behind."

"“When I was a child I said I don't want to be a woman."

"“I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?"

"“My mother named me after a miracle of nature: Waris means desert flower. The desert flower blooms in a barren environment where few living things can survive.”"

"What really made me take a stand was that nobody was doing anything."

"I just knew that I had to tell the world that there was torture, an undercover war against women. But this is not one person's war – all of us have to do something."

"I knew most married women in my community put up with everything and anything. Any abuse, hopelessness, and I thought, was I here to be used and be abused? I knew there was so much I could do with my life, but on my terms."