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1 " The truth has become an insult. "
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Half of a Yellow Sun
2 " You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone. "
3 " Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership. "
4 " Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery? "
5 " If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise "
6 " There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her. "
7 " She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought. "
8 " Greatness depends on where you are coming from. "
9 " And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it. "
10 " She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again. "
11 " Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person. "
12 " We never actively remember death,' Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die. "
13 " She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name. "
14 " Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness? "
15 " This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. "
16 " There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable. "
17 " You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be. "
18 " The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world. "
19 " This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see. "
20 " You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism. "