Lawrence Hill > Quotes

“To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“You must learn to respect," Papa said.

But I do not respect her," I said.

Papa paused for a moment, and patted my leg. "Then you must learn to hide your disrespect.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first 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.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“When it comes to understanding others, we rarely tax our imaginations.”
― Lawrence Hill

“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.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“beware the clever man that makes the wrong look right”
― Lawrence Hill

“Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“I looked up from the street and again at the wretched captives. I vowed not to let the noises of the city drown out their voices or rob me of my past. It was less painful to forget, but I would look and I would remember.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“I stood up to take some air outside. The stars were brilliant that night, and the cicadas were crying in endless song. If the sky was so perfect, why was the earth all wrong?”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“To gaze into another person’s face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.”
― Lawrence Hill

“Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.

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 the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“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.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name