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.

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

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

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.

Ifemelu thought about the expression "sweet girl." Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.

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

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.

femelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality

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.

...she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness.

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

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

It's worse than treachery. He's using force. Is that worse than guile?

The hardest thing in the world is to let go of who you once thought you were and to manifest your true self, at the risk of being unloved. This is self-actualization.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free.

For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.

I heard your whispered fantasies so clear Softly told in my earI opened my eyes you weren't thereSo real my dream, I was so awareBut we'll meet again so certainlyIn our whispered fantasy

Tour is disgusting, actually, I have no idea how people do it. Your brain would go to rot, unless you really, really worked hard at making sure it didn't.

My family and my friends are most important to me. These people are my foundation.

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.

I have to confess that it's crossed my mind that you could not be a Republican and a Christian.