“As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299)”

“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.”

“Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.”

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

“...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

“Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”

“...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.”