Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

“you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”

Healed, but in the way a broken bone that’s healed still aches at the first signs of rain.

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.

that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

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

she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

In Twi, she said, “There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”

we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.