Top 50 Caleb Azumah Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is a difference between being looked at and being seen.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

2. “It’s -′ You pause, frowning to yourself as you reach for the right expression. ‘You can’t live in a vacuum. And when you let people in and you make yourself vulnerable, they’re able to have an effect on you. If that makes sense.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

3. “To my queen, forever is a mighty long time, but I knew you before I met you, so now we’re free. You didn’t have a home coming into this world, but you’re home now. You’re home now.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

4. “You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

5. “To know someone before you knew them introduces a freedom previously unknown, when in their presence. Perhaps this is what home is: freedom. It’s easy to stay furled up where you can’t live, like folding a book in half on its spine to fit into pockets.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

6. “You flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

7. “Donatien Grau’s words: When the mind is lost in ecstasy, there is no condition for self-reflection, self-questioning. You’re.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

8. “You feel you have never been strangers. You do not want to leave each other, because to leave is to have the thing die in its current form and there is something, something in this that neither is willing to relinquish.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

9. “There’s so much more you wish to say but there aren’t the words.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

10. “You are more than the sum of your traumas.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

11. “You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they hold you close.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

12. “You dance through topics like two old friends, finding comfort in a language which is instantly familiar. You create a small world for yourselves, and for you both only, sitting on this sofa, looking out at the world which has a tendency to engulf even the most alive.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

13. “Perhaps that is how we should frame this question forever; rather than asking what is your favourite work, let’s ask, what continues to pull you back?”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

14. “To love someone like that, to know how beautiful and wholesome and healing such a love is, and to turn your back on it required no strength at all.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

15. “What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

16. “You don’t talk here, but even if you did, the words would fail you, language insufficient to reflect the intense mess of being this intimate with another.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

17. “It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

18. “Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain in tact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

19. “How does one articulate a feeling? There was a sensuality to the sharp movements you took towards the basket. Feeling rather than knowing; not knowing and feeling it was right. The moment slipped and shed. You had new skin. Bypassed something, the trauma, the shadow of yourself. This was pure expression. The steps were quick and sure like the intention of brush on canvas. No, you didn’t just put a ball through a hoop. You received a new way of seeing, a new way of being.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

20. “You catch a glimpse of someone else’s rhythm, and think, I know that song.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

21. “Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love?”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

22. “You’ll sigh and gaze towards a sky which shows no signs of darkening, and say, I guess where was something in the room that night, which I didn’t feel until I met her. Something which, looking back, I couldn’t ignore.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

23. “Faith is turning off the light and trusting the other person will not murder you in your sleep... How beautiful is beauty? You can find her lips with your eyes closed.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

24. “You wish you had the words, no, you wish you had the courage to climb up from whatever pit you have fallen into, but right now, you do not.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

25. “Your few days together have been spent doing nothing really, which is something, is an intimacy in itself.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

26. “You came here to speak of what is means to love your best friend. Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love? Nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, a direct gaze.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

27. “There should be no shame in openly saying, I want this. There should be no shame in not knowing what one wants.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

28. “Language fails us, and sometimes our parents do too. We all fail each other, sometimes small, sometimes big, but look, when we love we trust, and when we fail, we fracture that joint.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

29. “Faith is turning off the lights ad trusting the other person will not murder you in your sleep.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

30. “When the photo is developed, she’s sure, if you look closely, you’ll see the shadow cast across your skin, the eyes both seeing her and seeing the world, the honesty resting calmly on your features. If you look closely, you might see a tear making a journey from eye to cheek, as you cry for her. If you look closely, you’ll see what has always seen, what she always will: you.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

31. “She tells you she loves you and now you know that you don’t have to be the sum of your traumas, that multiple truths exist, that you love her too.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

32. “I know I’m a photographer, but if someone else says I’m that, it changes things because what they think about me isn’t what I think about me.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

33. “You do not want to die before you can live.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

34. “It is a strange thing, to desire your best friend; two pairs of hands wandering past boundaries, asking forgiveness rather than permission; “Is this OK?” coming a fraction after the motion.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

35. “You love yourself enough to take care.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

36. “You don’t always like those you love unconditionally. Language fails us, always. Flimsy things, these words.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

37. “You have always wondered under what conditions unconditional love breaks, and you believe that betrayal might be one of them.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

38. “It’s easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

39. “I dance to breathe but often I dance until I’m breathless and sweaty and I can feel all of me, all those parts of me I can’t always feel, I don’t feel like I’m allowed to. It’s my space. I make a little world for myself, and I live.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

40. “To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

41. “In the times we didn’t know ourselves, we always had each other; when faced with the unknown, we could lean back into the familiar, knowing each other’s hearts, knowing each other’s intimacies.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

42. “You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

43. “You don’t always like those you love unconditionally. Language fails us, always. Flimsy things, these words. And everything flounders in the face of real gratitude, which even a thank you cannot surmise, but a thank you to her also.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

44. “The train pulls in and she taps her Oyster card on the reader, stepping on board. You both wave as the doors close. She smiles at you as she settles into her seat, waving again. You begin to do the same, chasing after the train in pantomime fashion, spurred on by her laughter. You run and wave and laugh until the train gathers speed and the platform runs out. She escapes the frame, until it is just you on the platform, a little breathless, a little ecstatic, a little sad.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

45. “You realize there is a reason cliches exist, and you would happily have your breath taken away, three seconds at a time, maybe more, by this woman.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

46. “Language fails us, and sometimes our parents do too. We all fail each other, sometimes small, sometimes big, but look, when we love we trust, and when we fail, we fracture that joint. She doesn’t want it to break and maybe that’s not possible, but she doesn’t want to find out. She’s.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

47. “You’re drawing a line towards her. No, the line was there, is always there, will always be there, but you’re trying to reinforce, to strengthen.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

48. “To know someone before you knew them introduces a freedom previously unknown, when in their presence. Perhaps this is what home is: freedom.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

49. “Love as a form of meditation; reaching toward a more honest expression of self.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson

50. “I’ve only ever known myself in song, between notes, in that place where language won’t suffice but the drums might, might speak for us, might speak for what is on our hearts.”

— Caleb Azumah Nelson