"The clock is ticking"

"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

"The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again."

"To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength."

"The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave."

"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."

"Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten"

"Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own."

"Villages that their leaders came together to save themselves."

"At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population."

"I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots."

"He who brings kola brings life."

"I do not know how to thank you.' 'I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.' 'That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo. 'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika."

"Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death."

"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph."

"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print."

"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."

"Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."

"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"We have got to stop worrying about being loved and start worrying about being respected. And that's exactly how I'll lead our country."

"I'm a conservative, pro-life governor in a state where it is really tough to be both. A state like New Jersey, with lots of Democrats, but still we cut taxes, we balanced budgets. We fought the teacher's union."

"I don't disagree with ending Congress' retirement program. I'm a governor; I don't have a retirement program in my state, and I don't disagree with that."

"Social Security is meant to be - to make sure that no one who's worked hard and played by the rules and paid into the system grows old in poverty in America."

"I was appointed United States attorney on September 10, 2001. And I spent the next seven years of my career fighting terrorism and putting terrorists in jail."

"We have a lot of work to do in New Jersey, but I am darn proud we've brought our state back."