"Sometimes when we are singing, we are extremely discordant because, you know, your mouth is dry, you're scared and you're watching out the whole time for the police"

"Seeing my mother want something better for me and seeing her sacrifices [as] a single mother raising seven children - it motivated me a lot... It was her as a role model and the fact I had seen so much discrimination that made me want to become a human rights defender"

"And now under Mugabe, quite often police officers who do not know me, who do not know my background, will make all sorts of racist [anti-white] comments to me and so I've also had that... So it hasn't been easy"

"In other ways, my skin has been too white to be right. And yeah, it's been a problem... My first marriage failed because, at the wedding ceremony, my ex-husband's mother and father arrived at the wedding and the reality that I was mixed race hit them when they saw my mother and they saw my brothers, who are much darker than me, and they just couldn't take it and they left the ceremony. They hounded my husband with all this stuff about the son of Ham and all this racist rhetoric, and: 'You're going to have black children' and our marriage failed as a result of that"

"In some ways, my blood has been too black to be beautiful"

"Also, because of my activism there were threats that they would be taken and put in the youth militia, where they train these kids to be violent, so I had no other option but to allow my two sons, who were still living in the house, to come and be in the UK. My daughter is much older; she had already left home"

"It was just deeply frustrating for me to be a mother and see that my child had now gotten arrested for something that I was doing, and I was helpless. And so with Christopher's arrest, my mother-in-law [who lives in the UK] got a little bit worried and said: 'Look, please can we have the kids"

"We [Woza] get scared like anyone else," she says. "But I think what gives us the commitment to continue to do the things we do is that we speak 100% the truth, and we speak it from the moral authority that we are the mothers of the nation, and if your mother cannot speak out on your behalf then you have no one that will speak for you. So that is why we are committed to doing this: because we want a better future for our children"

"It's an incredible mix of this Irish and this Matabelean nation, which is a fighting nation. My grandmother was once arrested during the early 80s because the Mugabe regime said she had arms caches. That's the melting pot that I come from"

"Luckily for me, we ended up in a police station and some of the police officers were very sympathetic. There was no food there but one of those police officers came and whispered into the window of our cell: 'I'm bringing you food from your house. I know you are hungry.' So sometimes in life when you suspect the absolute worst thing, God sends you an angel"

"They were telling me they were going to murder me and bury me and no one would ever know"

"So it was a very bad day, and our lawyer had not been able to come to give us any update on our appeal process and I just thought: I don't know how we're going to get through this"

"And when we tried to object, they started accusing myself and my colleague of being lesbians because she had been beaten and I was rubbing her back"

"I am of light skin, they knew I was going to get very badly sunburnt, and we were just made to sit there for some form of punishment"

"Protests are called by … knocking on people's doors, talking to them, engaging them, understanding their issues and getting collective understanding of people power and the right to protest and how it can be exercised"

"Protests are not called by social network media, as some people want to portray"

"many people don't know what happened in Egypt and Tunisia because the news is blocked"

"People assume that people on the ground know what the Arab Spring is"

"I just want to be able to have my kids have jobs and I want to be able to afford their schooling"

"All of us back together under the same roof - that’s a bloody good end to this mess if you ask me."

"Because whoever it is, I’m sure I’ve already forgotten them. I can barely keep track of your brief human lives, you know here one moment gone the next. I should keep a list, so I can tick the names off as they depart."

"I’d burn the bloody tree down myself if u thought it would bring you back’ he said quietly. ‘Everything is so hopeless anyway, why shouldn’t we be happy for a bit? We could have don’t that, couldn’t we? I think so it would have been messy but… Instead my mind gives me this’ He gestured around at the dream desert, the dream sky. ‘A fucking dream of you. As if that would be enough."

"A fire that burns in secret, a lethal conflagration that you can only discover when its too late to save anyone."

"This level of fuck up is an Eboran speciality."

"I can suffer all that, I can suffer it and come through stronger, a weapon forged for your hand, but I cannot abide inefficiency."

"Fear can keep you obedient, or the need to stay as free as you can."

"All people need, in my experience, is a little push in the right direction. Or a giant kick up the arse. I am always happy to provide either."

"Judging by the constellations just starting to glint into life, the scent of the wind and the texture of the earth... I would say we're precisely in the middle of nowhere."

"Life is suffering. Life is war, and sacrifice. Life is victory."

"I was empty, just a thing for gathering dust, and now I am full of something, and if that causes me to make poor decisions, then I will live with it. Or die with it. I don't care."

"There was too much, but every moment they were inside she was aware of the terrible danger they were in, and she had the distinct sense that her luck was now the thinnest piece of fragile ice, and they were edging out further and further over and abyss."

"Not born of love, or affection, but a simple terrible need not to feel alone, just for a little while."

"Dark things are happening here, don't be getting me wrong. Young people lost, their poor families going out of their minds, and that evil thing lurking... It should have been dealt with a long time ago, but how could we have known?"

"To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay."

"Our armies, with their shining armour and singing swords are rust and dusty bones. We are like... an echo of something that came before."

"Beginnings are very elusive things, almost as elusive as true endings."

"Words are always important,’ said Jolnir. ‘Even normal, non-magical words, in the right place, can change the world."

"What you brought back, darling, was the truth. Which is rarely comfortable and never painless, but often, ultimately, worth knowing."

"Just between you and me, I've never crawled up a monster's arse before. It's quite exciting."

"Show me a people who don't have a bloody history."

"Don't be afraid of who you are."

"It's always the same with family, Wydrin reflected. You spend your life consumed with guilt that you're letting them down somehow, and then when you meet up with them you can't wait to get away again."

"There is, it seems to me, a certain type of man who is terrified of the idea of a woman wielding power, of any sort; the type of man who is willing to dress up his terror in any sort of trappings to legitimise it."

"“Any institution that claims to keep women locked up for their own good should be watched very close, in my opinion.”"

"This pain is not a weakness. It is strength. Our grief binds us. Do you feel it?"

"The struggle for women's rights in Zimbabwe continues and needs to be heard by the men who are mismanaging this country."

"In Africa, women are regarded as second class citizens and women like me who ‘don’t know their place’ are also a target."

"We formed WOZA as a movement to show a peaceful way women of all colours and class could restore dignity for the people of Zimbabwe."

"The power of love can conquer the love of power."

"Apart from the farming knowledge we gained,] our marital life has greatly improved, we now do things together"