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.

Never ever accept 'Because You Are A Woman' as a reason for doing or not doing anything.

If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.

There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.

Honesty. And I just really think there's a fundamental friendship that needs to exist, whether it's a lover, whether it's a sister...there's just this connection both people need to be effortlessly themselves.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

...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.