Top 35 Esi Edugyan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Folks think a lifetime is a thing stretched out over years. It ain’t. It can happen quick as a match in a dark room.”

— Esi Edugyan

2. “I guess mercy is a muscle like any other. You got to exercise it, or it just cramp right up.”

— Esi Edugyan

3. “To me, chocolate was the sole reason we are on this earth.”

— Esi Edugyan

4. “You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”

— Esi Edugyan

5. “How could he have treated me so, he who congratulated himself on his belief that I was his equal? I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those did the saving.”

— Esi Edugyan

6. “It’s like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.”

— Esi Edugyan

7. “There are several kinds of happiness, Washington. Sometimes it is not for us to choose, or even understand, the one granted us.”

— Esi Edugyan

8. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.” Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true.”

— Esi Edugyan

9. “Ain’t no glory made from being dependable.”

— Esi Edugyan

10. “Ain’t no man can outrun his fate.”

— Esi Edugyan

11. “How easy it is, to waste a life.”

— Esi Edugyan

12. “What is luck but something made to run out.”

— Esi Edugyan

13. “We must all take on faith the stories of our birth, for though we are in them, we are not yet present.”

— Esi Edugyan

14. “What a strange journey we embarked upon that afternoon, full of anguish and desire and wonder.”

— Esi Edugyan

15. “Such a thing is not possible.” I peered quietly at him. “Nothing is possible, sir, until it is made so.”

— Esi Edugyan

16. “The dead have no compassion for the living.”

— Esi Edugyan

17. “It’s early yet. It’s always early, while you still alive.”

— Esi Edugyan

18. “But human faces are so interesting,” said I. “Yes, to be sure. But when you are looking at one face, you are not looking at another. You are privileging that face. You are deciding who is worthy of observation and who is not. You are choosing who is worth preserving.”

— Esi Edugyan

19. “Life holds a sanctity for them we can scarcely begin to imagine; it therefore struck them as absurd that someone would choose to end it.”

— Esi Edugyan

20. “How strange it felt to be alive, and whole, and astonishingly worth saving.”

— Esi Edugyan

21. “Children know everything about beauty,” Titch countered softly. “It is adults who have forgotten.”

— Esi Edugyan

22. “The first rule of science, Captain, is to doubt appearances and to seek substances in their stead.”

— Esi Edugyan

23. “I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.”

— Esi Edugyan

24. “Canada kills any conversation quick, I learned long ago. It’s a little trick of mine.”

— Esi Edugyan

25. “Be faithful to what you see, Washington, and not to what you are supposed to see.”

— Esi Edugyan

26. “You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”

— Esi Edugyan

27. “Of all the excellent copyedits I’ve received over the years, Marie-Lynn Hammond’s was by far the best. Her work on Half Blood Blues was incredibly sensitive and astute.”

— Esi Edugyan

28. “They never returned. Only the old were left. And they began to die off. Those who did not die left the village by other means. In the end there was only one widow left, a dressmaker, and she began to sew the visages of those who had vanished. She hand-stitched the bodies and the clothes; she perfected the faces. Each and every doll was a precise replica of someone who once lived there.”

— Esi Edugyan

29. “My current life, I realized, was constructed around an absence; for all its richness I still felt as if the floors might give way, as if its core were only a covering of leaves, and I would slip through, falling endlessly, never to get my footing.”

— Esi Edugyan

30. “I hesitate, I suppose it is only from a general dread of company. We all of us wish for it, in our solitude, but on the eve of a great visit, we shudder.”

— Esi Edugyan

31. “The wrecked visage I was forced to carry like an unwanted warning to others was to her a known thing, a familiar mask. She seemed to see beneath it something of her own suffering and recovery – the acceptance of a life-changing wound, the will to go on.”

— Esi Edugyan

32. “Baltimore always seems like the kind of city you either leaving or just returning to. Ain’t no kinda place to hang your hat. Even as a kid I dreamed of getting out.”

— Esi Edugyan

33. “Though a child, I did not picture a monster – he was no creature all teeth, all vicious blue eyes behind mangled wire spectacles; his voice was not slow and reptilian, his hands not huge black claws. I knew the nature of evil; I knew its benign, easy face. He would be a man, simply.”

— Esi Edugyan

34. “The cabbie’s eyes sort of glazed over. Canada kills any conversation quick, I learned long ago. It’s a little trick of mine.”

— Esi Edugyan

35. “It’s always early, while you still alive.”

— Esi Edugyan

36. “The kid come in at a strange angle, made the notes glitter like crystal.”

— Esi Edugyan

37. “She laughed. I closed my eyes. It sounded damn mournful, that laugh of hers echoing off the square.”

— Esi Edugyan

38. “Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to different people,” he said, as though I did not know the truth of this better than he.”

— Esi Edugyan

39. “Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.”

— Esi Edugyan