Quotes from Esi Edugyan

Erasmus and I used to watch her as she sat for her Italian lessons in the afternoon. She was the most beautiful creature we knew. You were children, his father said. You knew nothing of beauty. Children know everything about beauty, Titch countered softly. It is adults who have forgotten.

Well, the main thing is to try not to die. I shall give you some advice on how to best bring that about.

Mister Philip was merely a man of his class, nothing more. His great passions were not passions but distractions; one day was but a bridge to the next. He took in the world with a mild dissatisfaction, for the world was of little consequence.

And that, it seemed to me clearly, was the more obvious anguish—that life had never belonged to any of us, even when we'd sought to reclaim it by ending it. We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies, from the revelation of everything our bodies and minds could accomplish.

Well, now that is a question. I will only say that if I have acquired any wisdom from Big Kit, it is to live always with your eyes cast forward, to seek what will be, for the path behind can never be retaken.

I stood out, and felt the constant touch of others' eyes.

We was all of us free, brother. For that night at least, we was free.

and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted

Today you ain't no kind of horn player you don't acknowledge some debt to Hieronymus Falk. He was one of the pioneers: a German Louis Armstrong, if you will.

Turn it," Thomas said, without smiling. "Play it again.

Our bodies know truths our minds neglect." He

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.

Was I shocked to find that the world of my childhood could be contained in a single crate?

What is the truth of any life, Titch? I doubt even the man who lives it can say. xxx You cannot know the true nature of another's suffering. No. But you can try your damnedest not to worsen it.

Lion. He told me of the wreck, and of the oil, stranded in the white wastes, and of its worth. I thought

What is the truth of any life, Titch? I doubt even the man who lives it can say. You cannot know the true nature of another's suffering." "No. But you can try your damnedest not to worsen it.

Regent's Park," she said, frowning. "The Zoo is there, is it not? I daresay you should feel quite at home." Again, she smiled. "In London, that is.

live always with your eyes cast forward, to seek what will be, for the path behind can never be retaken.

The condition of being alienated and "othered" reflects the ways in which navigating Western societies as a Black person is an endlessly unsettling experience, something that might be ripped whole from the pages of a speculative novel. Because of this, the search for lost cultural touchstones is a gesture towards survival: it is an Afrofuturistic act. At its heart it is the creation of a possible future based on a reconstructed, or reimagined past. In this way, a ware is wages against erasure.

No secret can be kept for long. It is one of the truths of this world.

What our lives but a series of farewells and returns, no?

In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values—the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman—they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence.

I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something.

With a great sign Titch rose from his creaking seat. The impossible occurs so infrequently in this world, even to those who would devote their lives to studying it. But anyone could see: he ached to believe.