Best Of Esi Edugyan's "Washington Black"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.

I knew the nature of evil; I knew his benign, easy face. He would be a man, simply. And it was his very anonymity that would make it impossible to see him coming.

p.176

It was not, I came to believe, that he did not love; only that he loved intermittently.

p. 206

"You were children," his father said. "You knew nothing of beauty."

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

p.208

Luck is its own kind of manacle, perhaps. I do not know when it happened, only that it gradually crept over me until one day I woke to a burning certainty: I needed to better my circumstances, or I would die.

p.231

She seemed relaxed, and with some of her severity now gone, there was only the fine intelligence of her eyes, and the obvious bodily pleasure she took in being out in fresh air.

p.252-253

"In any case, it was then that I recognized that my own values - the tenets that I hold dear as an Englishman--they are not only, nor the best, values in existence. 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."

p.261-262

"You are like an interruption in a novel, Wash. The agent that sets things off course. Like a hailstorm. Or a wedding."

p.303

The grounds had a feeling of plenitude, of growth and richness, but there was also a sense of vacancy, as thought the place had been abandoned not only by its people but by progress itself. One felt great age, and a silence like a held pause; it was as though everything that could happen here had already occurred, as though you were wading into an aftermath.

p.328

His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.

p.406