I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

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.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.