"He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite, it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way."

"Oh, why did he slap her when she's a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn't have a husband to speak for her."

"There is so much that is still silent between Jaja and me. Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked."

"A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative and creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."

"I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there."

"He missed her, a longing that tore deep into him. He resented her He wondered endlessly what might have happened. He changed, curled more inwardly into himself. He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness."

"He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over."

"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 was ugly."

"Today, we live in a vastly different world. 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. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."

"A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages."