Top 140 Akwaeke Emezi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

52. “Hope is not a waste of time. It’s a discipline.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

53. “I knew I was dancing with death every day, especially when I walked outside like that.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

54. “If you didn’t tell other people, was it real or was it just something the two of you were telling yourselves?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

57. “Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” – that evil is very often “terrifyingly normal.” She knew, as many who have suffered do, that the worst things can happen in the blandest of places – between the lines in a textbook omitting large swaths of history or in the hushing of a child who has something important to say. All these things are done in the name of keeping our worlds safe, consistent, banal.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

59. “Let me tell you the truth about men like that – they want soft moons. They want women with just enough crescent to provide a sufficient edge, tender little slivers of light that they can bring home to their mothers.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

60. “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

61. “Panic was a vulture inside my body, trying to get out, pecking and flapping wildly at me.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

62. “We’re afraid for you, they said. It’s like you’re on this thin line between being alive and being dead, like one small shift could send you either direction.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

63. “We came from somewhere – everything does. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed. It’s a kindness. It would be cruel not to.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

64. “You were like light. I couldn’t help but to turn my face to you if I wanted to keep living.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

65. “Give me an archive of madness that rots. I wouldn’t mind it one bit.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

66. “You feel like the first time in a long time I can even wonder about a possibility of not feeling alone.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

67. “He was hiding in everyone else’s house as if he didn’t have a home.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

68. “What if you didn’t think about what you wanted, what you hoped? What if you thought about what was happening instead? How does that change your wants?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

69. “It was better, for now, if Redemption thought he was saving someone else; everyone’s always braver when they think they’re the hero.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

70. “How fast is your alive? How smooth is your alive? How hard, how resilient? We’re alive because we can be hurt; we’re alive because we can heal. I think it’s beautiful. It’s why I fight.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

71. “I lay still and looked at the ceiling until sleep collected me again.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

72. “For a moment, there was the scream of tires and the mad chime of broken glass, the soft petals of white lilies, and a clod of dirt breaking apart in Feyi’s hand, but she brushed it all aside like smoke. “Single,” she’d said in return, stepping right into his personal space. He smelled of rain and bergamot.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

73. “The worst part of embodiment is being unseen.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

74. “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

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

76. “Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

77. “His grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

78. “I’m not sure my belief matters,” he says. “If it is, it is, whether I believe it or not.” page 161.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

79. “To be singled out and locked into the blurred consciousness of a little mind?”

— Akwaeke Emezi

80. “Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones were born with, tucked behind your liver.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

82. “There is something bright and brilliant in me. It doesn’t make me feel special. It makes me terribly alone.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

83. “He loves them as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

84. “When you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

86. “It is not easy to look at me, I know this very well.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

87. “Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

88. “She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it. Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

89. “If this story was a stack of photographs – the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country – it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

90. “Many things are better than a complete remembering; many things we do are a mercy.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

91. “She was good at other things too – crying, for example, which filled her with purpose, replenished all those little crevices of empty.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

92. “It was like a fork in the road has closed, shut off by an avalanche of grief, choked with rocks and a broken heart. It wasn’t supposed to open, and honestly, it still hadn’t, but somehow, an entirely new path had formed, green and creeping.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

93. “I was furious. It was if staying alive just gave everyone else time to leave you.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

94. “When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

95. “After Saachi left, the Ada sank even more into her books, by instinct, separating herself from this world and disappearing into others. She read everywhere: on the toilet, at the dining table, in the library before school assembly each morning. It is not clear how much saving these books were capable of.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

96. “It took a minute for Ada to understand, to realize that she was locked away, that all those parts of her he wanted, the parts she wanted to give, the parts that would complete the love they had- all those parts were gone. Or if they weren’t gone, they’d been put somewhere so far away that not even Ada could touch them, let alone Ewan. I watched her face fall and when she started crying, I held her and whispered apologies for what felt like forever.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

97. “And this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

98. “I felt like I was always running just a few steps ahead of them, holding secrets they couldn’t catch up to.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

99. “As she spread mayonnaise on the slices of bread and slid them into the sizzling rosemary butter, something tight eased up a little in Feyi’s chest. She was alone, just with herself, remembering the creeping peace of putting something together on a flame, the sounds of bread turning gold, the rhythm of grating Gruyere cheese and layering it, then watching it soften and melt.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

100. “They just listened to music and talked about their childhoods, and it was all nice and innocent if you forget that they were humans who had hearts.”

— Akwaeke Emezi