'And now it is all no more than a dream dreamt by Geoffroy Allen, in the night, next to Maou sleeping. The town is a raft on the river, where the oldest memory of the world is flowing. That is the city he wants to see now. He feels if he could just reach that city something would cease in the inhuman movement, in the slipping of the world towards death.'

-JMG Le Clezio, Onitsha

'He scarcely recognised himself in this moment of return. He was someone else. 'A man,' he thought, 'lying beside a window in an unknown house, in a village he could never find again on a map, a man who has seen so many people die, who has killed so many, who almost died himself and now observes this slender crescent moon in a milder sky.'

-Andrei Malkine, A Life's Music