Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

I craved heat and light the way other people craved coffee and cigarettes.

I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

every time you listen, the drugs work a little less and demand a little more, until finally you give them everything and get nothing in return—no rush, no surge of pleasure, just a momentary relief from the misery of withdrawal.

“It is sad, but—and I really do hate to say this—their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs. I mean, they are always on drugs. That’s why there’s so much crime.”

I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness.

talking about him as though only the portion of his life that had taken place before his addiction was worthy of examination and compassion,

But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false.

I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother,

I understood that the same thing that made humans great—our recklessness and creativity and curiosity—was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us.