Helon Habila Quotes

The further from home you wander, the closer you get to Siberia.

Hagar takes to prostitution whenrejection and hunger look her straight in the face

A mob wielding cudgels and cutlasses is hot on the heels of a youthwho desperately crosses to the other side of the road, narrowlymissing the fender of a truck. The mob follows growing bigger asit goes. The youth, looking over his shoulder as he runs, crashesinto a light pole and falls senseless to the ground. Before he canregain a second wind the mob is on him. I watch the cudgels riseand fall; I hear his wailing ululating screams finally turn into awhimper. They poured petrol on him and set him ablaze

Can you continue to love a person regardless of such shortcomings? Maybe because you hope to save them? Or because you can't help it? Isn't that what love is all about?

Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth.

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a stranger in a strange city.

The students, who should have been busy taking theirbaths and getting set for lectures, sat idly...discussing the boycottof lectures

There had been an accident. Bola’s family-father, mother, and twosisters had been in a car crash. It was late in the evening...theywere on their way to Ibadan for a visit...The father driving hadfailed to see the truck laying on its side in the middle of the road.It was a military truck carrying the furniture of an officer ontransfer from Lagos to Ibadan. The father and mother, who were in front, had died instantly; Peju, the elder sister, died on the way to the hospital; the other sister, Lola, sustained minor injuries

The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had theunfinished, abandoned appearance of an under waterscape.Crouching under the bigger or in their own clusters were hastilybuilt wood and zinc structures that housed an incredibly largenumber of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers,laborers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms

Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth

Look, we are living under siege. Their very presence on our streetsand in the government house instead of the barrack where theybelong is an act of aggression. They hold us cowed with guns sothat they will steal our money—they will continue subjugating uskilling all dissenters one by one, sending them to exile till there isno competitor left to oppose them.

Our story is over, the ink has dried, each of us must move on now and it will be as if we had never met, never loved, and never dreamt together.

You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way.

I didn't love him. He was a good, decent guy, but I wanted more at that time." She shrugged. "I was not so young anymore. Time was passing for me. I wanted more… excitement.

Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect.