The Black Pages Quotes

“Education and the future were important, but family was the true elixir of life.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“Issaka slowly opened his eyes and immediately they started stinging and tearing up. He blinked and blinked, his eyes itching and stinging more. Desert. He was in the desert, the sand soft and hot on his cheek. But not that hot. He was in the shade of a large stone, thank goodness. A few more feet and his face would have been burning. He opened his mouth to inhale the hot hot air. “My God,” he muttered. Not far off, the land grew gravelly, dotted with dry, stunted trees, and then climbed up to form jagged steep hills and rocky peaks that looked almost like hands cringing from the sky. He exhaled and his chest felt as if it were full of ash and flames. He coughed and pulled himself up. He fell onto his back and just lay there. Staring at the bright naked sky above.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“They wore sandy- and light-green-colored camouflage fatigues, carried AK-47s, and wore army boots with red socks topped with white stripes tucked into their trouser legs. Veiled turbans covered their faces, but Issaka could still see the area around their eyes. Though clearly baked by the sun, most of these men had the toffee skin tone of Arabs. They were hell-bent on leaving a wake of destruction as they fled the French army. The trucks stopped and the men in the backs of the trucks held their guns in the air, bouncing the trucks on their tires as they chanted in Arabic, “There is no god but God! We stand up for Islam!” A tall militant in a deep-green turban and camouflage fatigues got out of the driver’s side of the truck closest to the house. He didn’t carry a gun. He pointed a finger at Issaka’s father. “You have some evil things we’ve been looking for, old man.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“Faro?” he whispered. He winced, feeling something give from a place in his forehead he could not reach. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, she was gone. “Who the hell is Faro?” he muttered to himself. The name had probably bubbled up from a dream he’d been having or something.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“wild place and began to peruse the greater space, she found understanding of the French language within an hour, molding and shifting it into various dialects from various parts of the world like damp clay. Then Japanese and English.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“She sensed a path, a wide path that smelled of motion, frying fat, wind, cloth, and lightning, and so many other random, disconnected, reconnected, harmonious, dissonant things. At first, it was a tiny thread dangling from the edge of an enormity. She grasped it, and she was off. Faro had dwelled in a poorly written book for millennia, and this vastness overwhelmed her. Nevertheless, eventually, she remembered herself and that she was free. This was all she needed. She took off into a world within a world. She was a natural. The energy moved through the air in waves, and it was always there, even in this part of the world . . . once she reached for it. It was the perfect place for a freed genie. Before Faro fully dove in, she’d spent two hours lost in a world of colors, crunching, and movement. It was early, and though she spoke many languages, she could not speak the languages she came across. Once she pulled herself out of that”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages

“Shit,” he whispered. “I’m definitely home.” When he was a child, he could never sleep through sandstorms, especially the powerful tempête de sable, because they always sounded like screaming women, and when he dared to look into the bellies of these storms from the window, he could have sworn he saw dancing djinn. When he was a teen, there was a green grasshopper on his mother’s shoulder when she came home. It had laughed and disappeared right before his eyes. And all his life, he’d seen people in the markets who weren’t people. He and his friends were so used to these things that they stopped talking about them when they got older. Yes, he was home. The weird icon was no big deal.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, The Black Pages