"No one is interested any more, except the women. Only the women have religion in their blood; the men are completely indifferent. They claim that there's no difference between a Greek trader and a priest......."

"I am the earth she rests on … By herself she is nothing but a dead leaf that has broken loose from the tree. For all her flattering and gyrations, in the end she cannot prevent herself falling to the ground."

"In our country what Europeans describe as ‘adultery’ (a word loaded with heavy Puritanism) doesn’t on the whole provoke really violent reactions, even if people aren’t entirely indifferent to such peccadilloes."

"The seriousness with which any adultery is regarded is in exact proportion to the physical or social ‘distance’ between the two tribes – those, that is, of the cuckolded husband and the intrusive lover respectively."

"The best religion in the world remained that of St John of Kala, which consisted of two basic commandments: When you are thirsty, drink anything except water; and never forgo any occasion for making love, whatever time of day it may be (Sundays included)."

"I thought I had married a man, a real man… instead I married an arse-full of shit. My Children, my poor children – sold like the Lord who was sold by Judas…"

"A good hunter is like a whore, you can smell one a mile of."

"Oh, road, daughter of all our labour, lead me to the white man!"

"My future parents-in-law had asked me for a bundle of stock-fish so that I could marry their daughter according to civil rites. I have already given them thirty thousand francs, a case of beer, a pith-helmet, a sack of salt, three matchets, three sheep, a water-bucket, a cast-iron cooking pot, and a sack of rice. All that was left was the stock fish."

"A panther-rat runs along the path. He knows where he is going."

"Fuck off out of here! Go on get out of my hut!"

"If you heart begins to beat when you get to the end of your journey, retrace your steps."

"All these people who pretended they had come to grieve with Meka were just dogs."

"…One of my favorite things was that television was all in English. Growing up an English speaker in a predominantly French-speaking country, I couldn’t understand most TV shows since they were in French, so coming to America allowed me to enjoy such a simple pleasure…"

"Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart."

"Home will never go away Home will be here when you come back You may go to bring back fortune You may go to escape misfortune You may even go, just because you want to go But when you come back We hope you’ll come back Home will still be here."

"But the Universe gives us different sources of Love to unite us all as One. Who are we to decide what the source of our Love should be at any given time? Love is Love, and at any given point we have everything we need."

"People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?"

"Our people say no condition is permanent, Mr. Edwards. Good times must come to an end, just like bad times, whether we want it or not."

"It's so hard to be a stranger in a strange land. I don't think most people understand how difficult it is to leave behind what you know and come to a country where everything about you is considered "different.""

"…The reason why people connected with the characters is because they are real, and to write real characters you have to go deep into them. As a human you look at another human and you come with your own judgements, but as a writer you have to put that aside and just look at people for who they are. It is a process, and much of it is subconscious…"

"I did not do it because I wanted to one day have a book deal…I did it because I loved it, and I enjoyed it, and I did not know where it was going to take me. I did it out of love of the art."