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I thought the novel would be traditionally structured, set in the present, with flashbacks to the 18th century. But the longer I worked, the more interested I became in being able to watch time as it moved, watch slavery and colonialism and their effects – I wanted to see the through-line.

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Source: On what she originally envisioned for her novel Homegoing in “Yaa Gyasi: ‘Slavery is on people’s minds. It affects us still’” in The Guardian (2017 Jan 8)
Source quality: Source identified Names the work or year, but without an exact location.

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It is a dual thing – you belong and you don’t. I remember the Ghanaian passport official reading my name correctly and it felt like the biggest, warmest welcome. At the same time, I understand my native language but don’t speak it. So I am necessarily at this remove – the country can never be fully mine.

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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.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.

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. I

There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?” She

You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Yaa Gyasi (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.