Quotes from Esi Edugyan

This sky, Sid.It's the sky of the great epics.The great Polish epics. Of Pan Tadeusz

But human faces are so interesting," said I. "Yes, to be sure. But when you are looking at one face, you are not looking at another. You are privileging that face. You are deciding who is worthy of observation and who is not. You are choosing who is worth preserving.

Do you still call it talent, if it blooms without any kind of nurturing? That's got to be something else. She made talent sound like a damned insult.

The dead have no compassion for the living.

Life holds a sanctity for them we can scarcely begin to imagine; it therefore struck them as absurd that someone would choose to end it.

Her lips was hot, like the ridge of a cooking dish.

Be faithful to what you see, Washington, and not to what you are supposed to see.

There's all sorts of ways to live, Chip. Some of them you give a lot. Some of them you take a lot. Art, jazz, it was a kind of taking. You take from the audience, you take from yourself.

She laughed. I closed my eyes. It sounded damn mournful, that laugh of hers echoing off the square.

The only time I ever saw him untidy was after a fight. What a sight that was. James Bond run through a blender. You know the other fella probably got off worse.

Chip recons that he is charming as hell, and who am I to poke holes in his theory. That means that sometimes lies leave his mouth dressed like truth. He just can't help it.

Though a child, I did not picture a monster—he was no creature all teeth, all vicious blue eyes behind mangled wire spectacles; his voice was not slow and reptilian, his hands not huge black claws. I knew the nature of evil; I knew its benign, easy face. He would be a man, simply.

Tell me bout this caveman with the clam moustache been barkin speeches all over Germany.

What a strange journey we embarked upon that afternoon, full of anguish and desire and wonder.

How easy it is, to waste a life.

How strange it felt to be alive, and whole, and astonishingly worth saving.

The first rule of science, Captain, is to doubt appearances and to seek substances in their stead.

It's always early, while you still alive.

Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to different people," he said, as though I did not know the truth of this better than he.

My current life, I realized, was constructed around an absence; for all its richness I still felt as if the floors might give way, as if its core were only a covering of leaves, and I would slip through, falling endlessly, never to get my footing.

I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men." Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true.

They never returned. Only the old were left. And they began to die off. Those who did not die left the village by other means. In the end there was only one widow left, a dressmaker, and she began to sew the visages of those who had vanished. She hand-stitched the bodies and the clothes; she perfected the faces. Each and every doll was a precise replica of someone who once lived there.

It ain't really Czechoslovakian,' I said, coughing. 'We used to call it the Cheque. Like, you drink it up now, you pay for it later.

I had long seen science as the great equalizer. No matter one's race, or sex, or faith - there were facts in the world waiting to be discovered. How little thought I'd given to the ways in which it might be corrupted.