“It is not aloofness, superiority. Its a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesnt want to gather close her comrades?”

“The more I did itthe more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.It was something. Don't sa...”

“If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.”

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?”

“The drone in my ear, its like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into...”

“Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“God and government can work together”

“When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the governme...”

“In our country let us reject violence and selfishness which could destroy Nigeria unity.”

“With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order the...”

“Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.”

“The mediastenographers to power.”