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

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

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

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.

This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.

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.