“For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”

“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”

“Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.”

“He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, exactly, but he did keep it in a place where I could see it.”

“No man goes further than he who knows not where he is going.”

“I don't know if Marcus knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that's exactly what he was doing. He was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land.”