She thinks she is white,′ they used to sneer, and that was as bad as a curse.

People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear.

You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.

She sighed. ‘But it’s not that simple, you know, really it isn’t. It’s not really him, you know. I mean not really the person. It’s everything, it’s everywhere. So where do you break out to? You’re just one person and it’s everywhere. So where do you break out to? I don’t know, Tambu, really I don’t know. So what do you do? I don’t know.

You can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary. You’ve got to have some conviction, and I’m convinced I don’t want to be anyone’s underdog. It’s not right for anyone to be that. But once you get used to it, well, it just seems natural and you just carry on. And that’s the end of you. You’re trapped.

Everything about her spoke of alternatives and possibilities that if considered too deeply would wreak havoc with the neat plan I had laid out for my life.

The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.

Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables.

I was not sorry when my brother died.

Words like 'always' and 'never' were meaningful to my father, who thought in absolutes and whose mind consequently made great leaps in antagonistic directions when it leapt at all.