Under the Udala Trees

“Shame is the power we give others to wield over us.”
― Chinelo Okparanta

“If you set off on a witch-hunt, you will find a witch. When you find her, she will be dressed like any other person. But to you, her skin will glow in stripes of white and black. You will see her broom, and you will hear her witch-cry, and you will feel the effects of her spells on you.
No matter how unlike a witch she is, there she will be, a witch, before your eyes.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“You'll marry your studies? Marry your books? You already have one degree but you want another. You'll marry your degrees?”
― Chinelo Okparanta

“I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don't. It is my tears that allow me to glide.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“Also, what if Adam and Ever were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside yourself? What if that's all it was? And why not?”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“PAPA’S NAME, UZO, meant “door,” or “the way.” It was a solid kind of name, strong-like and self-reliant, unlike mine, Ijeoma (which was just a wish: “safe journey”), or Mama’s, Adaora (which was just saying that she was the daughter of all, daughter of the community, which was really what all daughters were, when you thought about it).”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“I was finding myself forced to acknowledge that the limit of my imagination was by no means the limit of the world.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees