Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.