Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.

There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.