Shrutel > Shrutel's Quotes

“It contains, instead, a yawning stretch of something unnamed, without present, future, or past, which I fill with imagined or remembered life.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“We stayed put, waiting for our future to emerge from the blasts, news reports, and innuendo.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“They were all-in, with everything they had, and that meant rummaging through defeat and disappointment to find a new plan and cause for hope.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“They were all there to greet me, enfolding me in the embrace of our collective dislocation from this place where all our stories go and return. Here is where we began. Where our songs were born, our ancestors buried.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“Ness could feel a heat rising from the earth, and she knew, the way a person knew air or love just by feeling, that the Devil was after them.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“James accepted, even though he had never lived in Asanteland and had known his grandfather only as a person knows his shadow, as a figure that is there, visible but untouchable, unknowable.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them. If the girl could not shake his hand, then surely she could never touch her own.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“She was speaking as one speaks to an old woman whose memories, those things that used to be hard-formed chrysalises, had turned into butterflies and flown away, never to return.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“The Missionary looked hungry, like if he could, he would devour her.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Looking at her grandmother’s hands now, it was almost impossible to distinguish scarred from wrinkled skin. The whole landscape of the woman’s body had transformed into a ruin; the young woman had been toppled, leaving this.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“His father had a deep-seated hatred of white people. A hatred like a bag filled with stones, one stone for every year racial injustice continued to be the norm in America. He still carried the bag.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing