When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you're leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be of a different order of existence.

No use crying over spilled milk.

I had fallen out of my secure world, precipitated beyond the territories I had only begun to control so skillfully. What a foolish step to take. What an insane move to make.

It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.

When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you're leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be of a different order of existence.

It's not easy to give up something you've had all your life.

Maybe that's what happens with age, I thought. All your life you force yourself to forget people who have hurt you, but as you get older and weaker their memory surfaces again, like a bubble in the water. You have to surrender, because you feel to tired to fight it and push it down again. And maybe, unexpectedly, you find out that instead, of revamping your anger, those memories produce an unexpected sweetness.