Small Island
Andrea Levy
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.”
“He looked so pained that I dreamed of taking his hands and making him dance”
“Describe snow to someone who's lived in the desert. Depict the colour blue for a blind man. Almost impossible to fashion the word.”
“Why you wan' the whole world when ya have a likkle piece a hope here? Stay. Stay and fight, man. Fight till you look 'pon what you wan' see.”
“Paved with gold, no - but, yes, diamonds appear on the ground in the rain”
“There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care.”
“Gilbert: How Clark Gable turn every women's head so? Foolish young English girls would see a movie star in every GI with the same Yankee-doodle voice. Glamour in US privates named Jed, Buck or Chip, with their easy-come-by-gifts and Uncle Sam sweet-talk. Dreamboats in hooligans from Delaware or Arizona with fingernails that still carried soil from home, and eyes that crossed with any attempt at reading. Heart-throbs from men like those in the tea-shop, who dated their very close relatives and knew cattle as their mental equal.”
“Gilbert sucked on his teeth to return this man’s scorn. “You know what your trouble is, man?” he said. “Your white skin. You think it makes you better than me. You think it give you the right to lord it over a black man. But you know what it make you? You wan’ know what your white skin make you, man? It make you white. That is all, man. White. […] listen to me, man, we both just finish fighting a war—a bloody war—for the better world we wan’ see. And on the same side—you and me. […] But still, after all that we suffer together, you wan’ tell me I am worthless and you are not.”
“But would the morning sun rise if I could not look on Michael’s face? Page 44”
“A mass whose desperation made them seem like the feckless, and whose drab presence drained the classroom of all colours until even the white potties at the corner glinted like diamonds. I will never forgive Hitler for turning human beings into that.”
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Book Keywords:
hate, migration, compassionate, racism, prejudice, romantic, words, discrimination
