Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old, like how discovering that the world is round means that you can no longer hang on to the idea that you might one day fall off the edge of the Earth. And now that you have learned that something you thought was true was never true at all, every idea that you hold firm comes into question. If the Earth is round, then is God real? Literalism is helpful in the fight against change.

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.

How does an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved?

I had become a master at thinking about working without actually doing it.

Neither of us really knew how to swim, and while we were trespassers, we weren’t stupid. We knew our mother would kill us if we died. We stayed in the shallows.