How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.

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.

I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.