Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

But even then, I could trap those thoughts and keep them caged in a corner of my mind, in a place where they could not spread their wings and take over my life.

I would learn later that Akin could keep himself neatly folded in while he drew out other people. He was the kind of person that many claimed as a dear friend. Many of those people did not even know him, but they never knew they did not know him.

Even the tongue and the teeth cannot cohabit without fighting

“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.”

Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world when we are gone.

“Now hear me well—what is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it is not yours, it is not yours o.”

Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach.

If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But when it's in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn't mean it's no longer love.

Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered.