Quotes from Lawrence Hill

Redemption is invented by the sinner.

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

When it comes to understanding others, we rarely tax our imaginations.

Mama is beautiful," I said. "Mama is strong," he said. "Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever." "What about the old people?" "They are the strongest of all, for they have lived longer than all of us, and they have wisdom," he said, tapping his temple.

I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains

When it comes to understanding others," I said, "we rarely tax our imaginations.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

It doesn't matter what we call your soul, Daddy Moses said, smiling at me. What matters is where it travels and who it uplifts.

Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by that pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.

Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.

To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too.

Reading felt like a daytime dream in a secret land. Nobody but I knew how to get there, and nobody but I owned that place.

I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

The misfortune of those women was my good luck, their misery my escape.

Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

Every voter knew that the Family Party had come to power promising to deport Illegals, to manage its borders more efficiently and to ensure that people of traditional European stock weren't overrun in their own country.

For this child of mine, home would be me. I would be home. I would be everything for this child until we went home together.

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can't see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.

Every time I had seen men rise up, they had not prevailed and innocent people had died. Daddy

I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first steps, why only men sat to drink tea and converse, and why women were always busy. I reasoned that men were weak and needed rest. As

He wouldn't take a baby," I said. "Child," Georgia said, "evil ain't got no roof.

Personally, I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration.