Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

I’ve always found that traffic on a bridge brings everyone closer to their own personal edge.

What would he do if he could touch me? If he didn’t have to contain all of that rage inside his Honda Accord, where would it go?

Asaa in context is a miracle berry. Without context, it is nothing, does nothing. The sour fruit remains.

but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul. Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about the part of humans that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our brains—mysterious, elegant, essential.

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be.

Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

“Soon,” she said, but that word had lost all meaning. I’d heard it from my father and understood it to be an empty word, a lie that parents told their children to soothe them.

I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I’d inherited that skill from my mother. I had become my mother in so many ways that it was hard to think of myself as a person distinct from her,