10 of the most beautiful sentences in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing

1. "We believe the one who has the power is the one who gets to write the story."

2. "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?"

3. “Be careful of fire. Know when to use it and when to stay cold,”

4. “You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

5. “The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.”

6. “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.”

7. “We are all weak most of the time,' she said finally. 'Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.' She smiled at him. 'But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

8. “Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. ”

9. “We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must 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 get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

10. "This feeling came from time to time. Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge."

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