"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."

"A home without daughters is like a spring without a source"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Though she was very wise, one could hardly say that she had been born in the wrong era; that had she lived in a different era, she would have been a great intellectual, a pioneer and a leader of humanity. In truth, such clarity of vision and strength of person are a discomfiture to all men of all ages and she would therefore never have really fitted in that, this or any other century; for human beings prefer to be left alone to muddle along in confusion—it is more comfortable than to suffer the pain of self knowledge."

"The women’s halls of residence, ‘the Box’ as it was known, was the hunting ground for all and sundry, and big cars were very evident especially on Saturdays when well dressed, well-to-do men descended upon the place. It was the thing to have a girl friend on campus…there were two categories of girls—the fast-moving "Mercedes" types and the "clipboards."

"He’d better be careful; I hear there is a disease called AIDS waiting to pounce on any careless person these days"

"All the fears of her childhood were coming back. There was a vice-like band around her head and she thought she would faint. In her head one thought went round and round, beating its wings like a trapped bird. “My child - not you, not you!"

"I have heard rumours also; but most say it is just Western propaganda. Anyway you doctors can do miracles these days. A mere VD cannot elude a cure for too long."

"You must realize that little irritations become more glaring, when there is that basic difference…I can’t imagine anything more annoying than their talking to their son, and your children, in a language you cannot understand. It makes you even more of an outsider than you are already."

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

"Her therapy was simple for there is no greater psychologist than the one who graduates from the hard school of life."

"How can you know where you are going if you do not know where you are coming from?"

"You may be twice my size, but I have three times your courage"

"Bitterness is poison to the spirit for it breeds nothing but vipers some of which might consume your very self. Pain and sorrow all humans feel; but bitterness drops on the spirit like aloes—causing it to wither."

"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."

"Red is the color of sanctity. It’s the color pure girls will bleed when Elder Durkas tests them."

"Infinite Wisdoms caution against talking to unmasked women, against even looking at them. They may be demons in disguise."

"They enrich themselves by your suffering—parasites, quite literally draining the blood from you."

"I don't think you're weak for being scared. I don't think you could be as strong as you are if you weren't."

"If I asked you to catch me the moon with your bare hands, how would you do it?" she asked suddenly. Adil closed his eyes, and Karina could not stop staring at the way the gold light illuminated his dark skin. When the moon began to set, I'd wait with my hands beneath it until it sank right into them. And then I'd turn around and give it to you. He turned to his side and gave Karina a shy smile. But that's a stupid answer, isn't it?"

"The best way to honor them would be to take them with her toward whatever lay on the other side of that marvelous sunrise."

"Life is full of cheaters [...] If you're playing fair, you're not playing to win."

"Teach me what you know."

"You tear yourself down for things you could not have known or done... why punish a seed for not yet being a tree."

"Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens."

"First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one."

"The people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay."

"The past devours those naive enough to forget it."

"Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours."

"....to aid even one person is to save an entire world."

"Nothing good can come of a place that refuses to see the pain of the people on whose backs it was built."

"The pain you have endured does not justify the pain you inflict on others."

"This is my mind. I am the strongest person here."

"Sillier than Praxilla’s Adonis."

"Ὦ διὰ τᾶς θυρίδος καλὸν ἐμβλέποισα, παρθένε τὰν κεφαλὰν, τὰ δ᾿ ἔνερθε νύμφα."

"Ὑπὸ παντὶ λίθῳ σκορπίον, ὦ ἑταῖρε, φυλάσσεο."

"Second year of the 82nd Olympiad (451 BC), flourished Crates the comedy-writer, Telesilla, Praxilla, and Cleobulina."

"Κάλλιστον μὲν ἐγὼ λείπω φάος ἠελίοιο, δεύτερον ἄστρα φαεινὰ σεληναίης τε πρόσωπον ἠδὲ καὶ ὡραίους σικύους καὶ μῆλα καὶ ὄγχνας·"

"Praxilla of Sicyon, too, was admired for the drinking-songs she wrote."

"Praxilla was portrayed in bronze by Lysippus, although she spoke nonsense in her poetry."