Top 140 Akwaeke Emezi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes, you remember me better than I remember myself. I think that’s important in a friendship – to hold reflections of people for them, be a mirror when they start fading in their own eyes.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

2. “Knowledge can do that to a person, Pet replied. I’ve seen it with you humans. The unseen can tear your eyes open when it comes into sight, and sometimes the mind behind that tears as well.” -Pet.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

3. “There is no right thing, Pet replied. There is only the thing that needs to be done.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

4. “What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

5. “Bitter knew her name was heavy but she hadn’t minded because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam – that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest. You could see things clearly if they were honest; you could decide what to do next, because you knew exactly what you were dealing with.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

6. “People can do such spectacular things if you forget to tell them it’s impossible. I want them to try.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

7. “If nobody sees you, are you still there?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

8. “The truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen, it whispered in her mind. A thing which is happening happens whether you look at it or not. And yes, maybe it is easier not to look. Maybe it is easier to say because you do not see it, it is not happening. Maybe you can pull the stone out of the pool and put the moon back together.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

9. “Truth does not care if it feels true or not. It is true nonetheless” -Pet.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

10. “Bitter knew her name was heavy, but she hadn’t minded, because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam – that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

11. “Hold my life for me.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

12. “The truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

13. “Love is transformative in that way. Like small gods, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really believe.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

14. “I think we’re just figuring out how to survive a world on fire... that it’s okay to be alive.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

15. “The angels took the laws and changed them, tore down those horrible statues of rich men who’d owned people and fought to keep owning people. The angels believed and the people agreed that there was a good amount of proper and deserved shame in history and some things were just never going to be things to be proud of.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

16. “The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

17. “You want many things, you are full of want, carved out of it, made from it, yes. But the truth does not care about what you want, the truth is what it is. It is not moved by want, it is not a blade of grass to be bent by the wind of your hopes and desires” -PET.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

18. “Some of the things you know are not true, it said. You have to learn that things might not be real, even if they look familiar.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

19. “I would say it was too late, but time has stopped meaning what it used to. I don’t mind anymore. I see how things work now, from this side. I was born and I died. I will come back. Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

20. “I have lived many lives inside this body. I lived many lives before they put me in this body. I will live many lives when they take me out of it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

21. “Remembering is the death of mercy.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

22. “The first step to seeing is seeing that there are things you do not see, it said. Jam paused and frowned. I don’t understand. The creature sighed and rustled its fur a little. If you do not know there are things you do not see, it said, then you will not see them because you do not expect them to be there. You think you see everything, so you think everything you see is all there is to be seen.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

23. “Monsters don’t look like anything, That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

24. “What is love if not a shield thrown up around you when you are too injured to throw it up yourself?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

25. “How much of my mother’s life I missed because I was a child.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

26. “Also, the problem is, when you think you’ve been without monsters for so long, sometimes you forget what they look like, what they sound like, no matter how much remembering your education urges you to do. It’s not the same when the monsters are gone. You’re only remembering shadows of them, stories that seem to be limited to the pages or screens you read them from. Flat and dull things. So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

27. “Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

28. “You can chase the truth, but who could avoid the moment of hesitation when you wonder if you really want what you’ve been asking for? Kavita knew that what the.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

29. “The revolution needs artists, just like it needs healers and storytellers, just like it needs the organizers and protesters. It’s all one big organism working together.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

30. “This keeping of a secret, it is not a good thing to keep, you are keeping too many and they do not fit inside your heart, they will keep spaces between you and your humans” -PET.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

31. “But I’ve learned that you can’t force forever on the wrong people. They belong exactly where they are, giving exactly what they want to. I don’t ask for anything more. I figure I shouldn’t have to.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

32. “So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

33. “It wasn’t me,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.” If you don’t know what happened, how do you know it wasn’t you?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

34. “When you break something, you must study the pattern of the shattering before you can piece it back together.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

35. “I can see you change,” he told us, his eyes narrowed in interest. “Your body language. How you talk. Your eyes. You’re not always the same person, are you?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

36. “The world in my head has been far more real than the one outside – maybe that’s the exact definition of madness, come to think of it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

37. “Adults were like that so much of the time, inflexible when they thought they had something to protect.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

38. “It’s never too late- that’s a human lie of time, there is no late, there is mostly now, because now is so flexible, I find. You can change a whole life, a whole world, inside of a now.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

39. “You don’t want to give us a chance to prevent the monsters; you want to wait until the monsters are full-grown and rampaging, so you and the rest of your kind can swoop in and hunt them and save the day. Except that people, kids, are going to get hurt your way. But you don’t care, right? As long as you have something to hunt. You don’t care if people get hurt. I think that makes you more of the monster.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

40. “And that’s something I’ve learned in the years since, that there are so many different types of love, so many ways someone can stay committed to you, stay in your life even if y’all aren’t together, you know?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

41. “Sometimes, you recognize truth because it destroys you for a bit.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

42. “People want to be the ones drawing the lines, building the boxes, making the names. Maybe because stories live inside all those structures, and if you’re the one controlling the stories, then you’re the one in power. So they get really angry when you name yourself, especially if you’re the type of thing they were expecting to name.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

43. “Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

44. “Guava-stuffed chicken with caramelized mango and a spicy mango mojito sauce. Alim had ruined mango for her, but every time Feyi remembered how shocked and open his face looked with desire, she wasn’t sure she minded. There was a lemongrass-and-pineapple-glazed pork belly with Zanzibari spiced octopus, grilled jerk watermelon with couscous and a basil oil, and finally, a banana cream parfait with coconut shortbread alongside broiled pineapple with macadamia toffee, drizzled with rum caramel.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

45. “It is a one-way trip, my love, you cannot undo being born, you cannot undo the body. There is no rush. It’s okay for it to be slow; you only think it’s slow because it’s flesh. A few decades are nothing, they laugh. There’s no need to destroy the body; the body is already destroying itself, the body is already dying. I take comfort in that. I am already being destroyed, I am already dying and going home, and I have work to do.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

46. “The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

47. “Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

48. “If you release the idea of the essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes. Without it, masks take on a new expanse of possibility. They can conceal, yes, but as the magician says, they can also clarify what is true – in precisely the same way a story can tell you something better than stark facts ever could.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

49. “You had to see Pet to accept that it was real in this world; the telling would never be enough. Words are never enough for a lot of things.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

50. “She moved like the ground was falling away beneath her feet, the future rushing toward her.”

— Akwaeke Emezi