“The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.”

“But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.”

“Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

“But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb; what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. the reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.”

“In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”

“Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.”

“A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.”