This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

The higher you go, the fewer women there are.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.