Top 140 Akwaeke Emezi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He smelled like grass and wind and clothes that had been dried in the sun.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

102. “Open gates are like sores that can’t stop grieving: they infect with space, gaps, widenings. Room.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

103. “It wasn’t my first mutilation, but it was one of my best.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

104. “They were keeping me alive in the sweetest way they knew how, you see.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

105. “They fit into each other’s lonely worlds.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

106. “If Vivek had been alive, he would never have conceded her point, but 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

107. “They didn’t believe in interfering with the child’s imagination, and so when the Ada finished one of her many books and decided that she could talk to animals, no one corrected her. ‘It did no harm to let her believe that,’ Saul said, and the Ada continued to believe wildly, in Yshwa and fairies and pixies living in the flame of the forest blossoms.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

108. “I wasn’t worried about failing, because if I failed my life would be just the same as it already was, so there was nothing to be scared of. If I succeeded, however, everything would change, and that was terrifying.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

109. “She liked the city as an entity better; it didn’t care who you were or what your damage was, it ate everyone up indiscriminately.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

110. “I had surrendered and the reward was that I knew myself.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

111. “Your parents are adult humans, Pet replied, pulling on the thought behind the words. Younger ones have fewer blocks about belief” -PET.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

112. “I died at his mouth.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

113. “Some were statues of the dead, mostly the children whose hashtags had been turned into battle cries during the revolution. Others were giant sculptures with thousands of names carved into them, because too many people had died and if you made statues of everyone, Lucille would be filled with stone figures and there’d be no room for the alive ones.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

114. “She didn’t say anything, not wanting to interrupt his silence. Instead, she climbed into the silence with him, staying there, feeling its soft curves.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

115. “It is a different kind of power to be able to anoint yourself instead of kneeling for someone else to do it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

116. “In the middle of Ada’s pain, I kept looking for a window I could use to take her home. She didn’t even have the strength to fight me, and my plan could’ve work then, except that one day, Ada got a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize. When she picked up, Ewan’s voice poured into her ear.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

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

— Akwaeke Emezi

127. “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

128. “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

129. “They sat like that, another picture, as the evening pulled across the veranda and sky.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

130. “Secrets do not help truth” -PET.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

131. “I was so mad after he died because I knew he would think it was just going to become part of my story, a disaster I’d recover from, and it made me so angry because I didn’t want to recover. I didn’t want to keep having a story. I wanted our stories to run together and stop at the same time, so neither of us would have to be alone.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

132. “It was hard to keep secrets; you had to keep track of them, regulate how they moved through your body, make sure they didn’t swerve and jump out of your mouth.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

133. “It was her first time kissing a white person, and briefly, she wondered why he didn’t have any lips.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

134. “In the meantime, the angels banned firearms, not just because of the school shootings but also because of the kids who shot themselves and their families at home; the civilians who thought they could shoot people who didn’t look like them, just because they got mad or scared or whatever, and nothing would happen to them because the old law liked them better than the dead.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

135. “She was glad Milan hadn’t gone looking for more. She was a little hurt he hadn’t gone looking for more.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

136. “Kavita said nothing to him when she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

137. “The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

138. “He was so beautiful that he made the air around him dull.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

139. “I held my breath, but it didn’t feel like I was holding my breath, it felt like there should never have been breath. It felt like the entire concept of breath had been something I imagined. After all, my body was never meant to move like this. These lungs had to have been built for show. They should never have expanded and I should never have been alive.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

140. “People were known to return in renovated bodies; it happens all the time.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

141. “I got tired of playing with men who had cruelty just a slip behind their eyes.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

142. “She loved being in the library, the almost sacred silence you could find there, the way it felt like another home.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

143. “She wanted to take a picture of it but she already knew half the beauty would die inside a camera lens and she’d never quite catch the edges of it.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

144. “But it is only a fool who does not know that freedom is paid for in old clotted blood, in fresh reapings of it, in renewed scarifications.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

145. “Later, much later, I wondered if I should have told his parents what was going on, if that would have helped him, or saved him a little.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

146. “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.”

— Akwaeke Emezi

147. “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.”

— Akwaeke Emezi