In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

I had the constitution of a missionary.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

This may be my only chance to see humans before these two are made into fertilizer for Moonwind's rosebushes.

I think if you're going to get a tattoo, it should be significant, especially when it's all the way up your arms and your body.

I don't have a Bluetooth thing on my ear. That bugs me.

We should not be borrowing money from the Chinese to bail out the Greeks. What's coming next? Intergalactic bailouts?

People hate to and will not read instructions.

You'd be surprised how many stupid mistakes I've made. I make stupid mistakes all the time, and some of them have been very big stupid mistakes.

There is nothing to be valued more highly than to have people praying for us; God links up His power in answer to their prayers.

By dedicating so much concentration to the issue of security, bilateral matters pass to a secondary level.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.