Quotes from Esi Edugyan

I would remove my shoes and, still clutching my belongings, lurch over the cold, damp rocks, the air smelling of wet weeds. With the sun just piercing the horizon, the light was hazy and filmy, the sand seeming to stretch on into oblivion. The sea foam stirred whitely at the edge of the water.

Had Africa's mineral wealth not been plundered, had its people not been enslaved and made subjects, the possibilities for its future would be limitless.

The level of advocacy on behalf of others is a rarity -- and sorely needed. The work of equality is the labour not of the few but the many, including those who have benefited and continue to benefit the most from an unequal system. Change that must take place on a broad social scale must be just that -- broadly social. Everyone has their part to play. But it is not for advocates to occupy spaces intended for the very people they are fighting for.

dark Portuguese figs we'd given him from our trip to the Serra da Estrela.

I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.

We will make land at Norfolk,' Titch said, as if this was some reassurance. It meant little to me, of course. Titch explained we would be entering Chesapeake Bay, and would therefore soon be leaving the ship. We would also, however, find ourselves subject to the laws of American freedom. '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.

There was but a thread between life and death, and he had stumbled blamelessly onto the wrong side of it.

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.

My father? I did not know my father.

In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values - the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman - they were 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. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.

I do not much care for childhood. It is a astate of terrible vulnerability, and is therefore unnatural and incomaptivle with human life.

Sometimes...I will stand ...and look upon the babe's face at a distance. I almost cannot bear it: the soft skin, the tenderness, the eyes so guileless and trusting. I would almost wish the innocent to be stricken at once, there, in God's house. To keep such purity intact. From the arms of God to the arms of God.

I suppose there musst have been a deep love between him and his father, a love I could get no sense for because of its reticence. But as with most loves, it was shadowy, and painful, and confusing, and Titch seemed to me overly eager and too often hurt.

What is luck but something made to run out.

Of all the excellent copyedits I've received over the years, Marie-Lynn Hammond's was by far the best. Her work on Half Blood Blues was incredibly sensitive and astute.