Quotes from Andrea Levy

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.

Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live

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

We went up and up into the heavens until people were just dots below us. As we hung right at the top--the twinkling electric lights below mingling with the stars--Father said something I will never forget. He said, 'See here, Queenie. Look around. You've got the whole world at your feet, lass.

If truly tested, how would we react?

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.

My beloved son Thomas did caution, when first I set out to flow this tale upon the world, that although they may not be felt like a fist or a whip, words have a power that can nevertheless cower even the largest man to gibbering tears.

But would the morning sun rise if I could not look on Michael's face? Page 44

Australia smelt of apples. Ripe, green, crisp apples. A smell so sharp and sweet it made my teeth tingle.

The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.

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.

While Hubert perusing the countryside with a gentle smile said, 'But look, man, it just like home,' to boys who yearned to see the comparison --green hills that might resemble the verdant Cockpit country, flower that might delight as much as a dainty crowd of pink hibiscus, rivers that could fall with the same astounding spectacle of Dunn's rive.

Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country.

You see, there is a list, written by the hand of the Almighty in a celestial book, which details the rich and wonderful accomplishments his subjects might achieve here on earth: father of philosophy, composer of the finest music, ace pilot of the skies, paramour to lucky women. Now I knew: beside the name Gilbert Joseph was written just one word -- driver. All endeavours to erase, replace or embellish were useless.

I yearned for home as a drunk man for whisky. For only there could I be sure that someone looking on my face for the first time would regard it without reaction. No gapes, no gawps, no cussing, no looking quickly away as if seeing something unsavoury. Just a meeting as unremarkable as passing your mummy in the kitchen. What a thing was this to wish for. That a person regarding me should think nothing. What a forlorn desire to seek indifference.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they had 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.

No, no, no, no. Don't get carried away, man. One thaw is not the summer.