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“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”

“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.”

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.”

“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

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

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

“I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

“Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not “if only.” Not “as long as.” I matter equally. Full stop.”

“The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”

“I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.”

“I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.”

“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”

“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.”

“Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.
'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything.
Ever.”

“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.”

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”

“But by far the worst thing we do to males—by making them feel they have to be hard—is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.”

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”

“The truth has become an insult.”

“Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.”

“I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.”

“Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

“They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.”

“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”

“They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

“To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.”