Reading Notes: Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

"The need to call this thing "good" and this thing "bad", this thing "white" and this thing "black", was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else."

"Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind's eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect."

"Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves."

"The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended ... they would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind."

"... when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect picture."

"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."