18 Quotes by Earl Lovelace

As a teacher, his task was not to make policy but to follow the policy made by the Department.

the sun had tanned her so that the rich velvety blackness of her skin glistened and she felt so much herself on those days of Carnival, soaked so deeply with a sense of her own beauty, that after the festival, she continued to keep her hair in the same fashion and wear her skin with the same pride, the result being that men took her for a foreign woman

We are on the verge of listening.

All his life he had managed in such ways to disconnect himself from things which he couldn’t escape and which threatened to define him in a way in which he didn’t want to be defined, and go on untouched, untouched by things that should have touched him, hurt him, burned him.

The praying stopped, and Alford turned from that far near distance and walked out on to the veranda alone, thinking still of that self beyond his reach in a faraway place, as a loss, as something he had been deprived of. But how do you feel the loss of a self that you did not have to lose? How can you lose an Africa you did not know? But that was what he felt: the loss of not having had that loss to lose.

I was thinking that if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace.

She recognized that this city was a place that granted you only what you were willing to claim.

Alford was going to start this fast the same way he had started everything else, alone and uncertain.

I didn’t know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.