Quotes from Earl Lovelace

I was thinking that if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace.

I so love you! It is like my heart wants to be one with yours. I feel it melting inside of me, and like sunshine flowing out through cracks and streaming into your heart.

I saw it clearly. The tragedy of our time is to have lost the ability to feel loss, the inability of power to rise to its responsibility for human decency....I was thinking that if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace'.

I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.

All of it was there but nothing had substance. It was as if they were all shadows, as if her leaving had taken the life out of the living things and left them shadows. he himself was a shadow.he felt no weight in his step, ,no sound to his voice, no solidity to his gestures. he forgot time. he felt the ache of a pain whose depth he could not fathom no whose end anticipate

She recognized that this city was a place that granted you only what you were willing to claim

All his life he had managed in such ways to disconnect himself from things which he couldn't escape and which threatened to define him in a way in which he didn't want to be defined, and go on untouched, untouched by things that should have touched him, hurt him, burned him.

The praying stopped, and Alford turned from that far near distance and walked out on to the veranda alone, thinking still of that self beyond his reach in a faraway place, as a loss, as something he had been deprived of. But how do you feel the loss of a self that you did not have to lose? How can you lose an Africa you did not know? But that was what he felt: the loss of not having had that loss to lose.

Alford was going to start this fast the same way he had started everything else, alone and uncertain

As a teacher, his task was not to make policy but to follow the policy made by the Department.

the sun had tanned her so that the rich velvety blackness of her skin glistened and she felt so much herself on those days of Carnival, soaked so deeply with a sense of her own beauty, that after the festival, she continued to keep her hair in the same fashion and wear her skin with the same pride, the result being that men took her for a foreign woman

When we woke up to the realization that we were independent and that independence meant having a culture that we could call our own, we discovered that all we had that might be termed indigenous or native was what had been created or reassembled and maintained here by those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Everybody, he mused had everything worked out. Except me

Few have failed to observe that the much vaunted cultural creativity expressed in Trinidad and Tobago has come principally from the ordinary African descended people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.