Alain Mabanckou

"I’m nothing, I’m everything,’ he declared. ‘The street is my mother. The sun is my father. What more should I ask of life?”"

"Singing in the old-fashioned language of this good-hearted man, who sold us Hope at the lowest possible price,"

"The sweetness of honey does not soothe the bee sting."

"it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, Ive traveled, one might say, through literature, each time Ive opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, Id just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters"

"A fly’s not a bird just because it can fly."

"I want to cry now, not later! I want to be the first because if I cry after the others how will we know that I cried too?"

"When the white people came to Africa, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed: when we opened them, the white people had the land and we had the Bible."