"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."

"If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa."

"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."

"It would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out."

"Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that."

"They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what's the deal, is race an invention or not?"

"Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that."

"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."

"She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size."

"A father is as much a verb as a mother."

"In that strained, still second when her eyes met Christina Tomas's before she took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn's coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent."

"Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back."

"You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa."

"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."

"Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice."

"Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality."

"The sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, the norm."

"The Red Cross irritated Ugwu, the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour."

"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."

"She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else."

"Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans."

"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."

"Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person."

"At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men."

"I am just as human as the man."

"It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair."

"There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman's well-being."

"Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit."

"Greatness depends on where you are coming from."

"If we do something over and over again, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again, it becomes normal."

"One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad."

"If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise."

"If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices."

"Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor."

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

"Femelu could not understand this, her mother's ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality."

"Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don't teach boys to do the same?"

"Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. . . And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away."

"Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable."

"You don't even have to love your job, you can merely love what your job does for you - the confidence and self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning."

"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?"

"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?"

"Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is."

"The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes."

"If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner."

"The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it's a lie but you buy into it and that's all that matters."

"Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are the little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most."

"I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination."

"We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable."

"Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care."