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“You look at me and judge me. And I just want to ask, for what? I am in full control. No one has a gun to my head. Why can't this be my profession,one I have chosen for myself? I tell you prostitutes are professional in their skills and practise it like the vocation of true apostles- and why shouldn't they? What's so different from the accountant or the doctor selling his time? I ended up in this profession in the same way someone might end up being a lawyer because the couldn't get into engineering or dentistry,or because they couldn't get into medicine, or even a banker who grew up telling everyone they want to be a soccer player. They do those things because that was what was available for heir talents and their circumstances at that time. But do we pity them? No, because that's lif-”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“You know, Tsitsi, you are so quick to point out that you are not a prostitute. I just want to laugh because you are just falling into rank. You all should spare us your ‘moralityâ€� that lauds ‘womenâ€� over the supposedly lesser ‘whoresâ€� and ‘girlsâ€�. That’s how society sees us. That’s how you see us. You want it to be that we are like coal, only to be loved in the dark and tossed like ashes come morning.”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“The time for careers and passions was gone. Hunger pangs displaced ambition.”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“Silently, she wondered whether this was the same desperation, the same impotence that grips many men by their shirts, their T-shirts, their work vests, gripping them equally hard, shaking them and leading them to drink,to beating or the noose. Was this it?”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“It was like she had been playing 'nhodo' with her life, foolishly trying to outsmart an imaginary playmate named Fate.”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“Tsitsi and the rest of the nation who now found themselves degreed and broke, her parents and the parents of the nation with degreed children and still broke, had thought-convinced themselves-that the poverty of their lives could be eliminated by 'professionalisation'.”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine

“The house may have been impressive in stature, but having gasped as they drove up the driveway, she had been disappointed by the interior. It was so bare. Lacking in things. She was mystified by this invisible wealth and the austerity of the house.
She didn’t understand Mrs Zvobgo, she was rich but chose to live, in Tsitsi’s opinion, like a pauper. She was clearly uninterested in buying things. Maybe it was because she had never known poverty. Tsitsi on the other hand felt she was well versed in it.
Tsitsi, unlike Mrs Zvobgo, wasn’t above noveau riche vulgarities. She didn’t want any sort of English boarding school minimalism. She wanted more. She wanted things. Things . Things. Things. Many of them. That much she was willing to admit. She made a private decision then that she would change this when she became the woman of this household. She knew they said wealth whispered and rich shouted, but what good was having all that they did if she had to keep it like some sort of secret?”
― Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine