Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You’re the author on your own life story.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

2. “Cooking is about respect. Respect for the food, respect for your space, respect for your colleqgues and respect for your diners. The chef who ignores one of those is not a chef at all.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

3. “Because no one will ever take care of me but me.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

4. “Just because your father’s present, doesn’t mean he isn’t absent.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

5. “If Medusa was Dominican and had a daughter, she might wonder at this curse. At how her blood is always becoming some fake hero’s mission. Something to be slayed, conquered.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

6. “The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

7. “I wrap myself tight around the feelings I cannot share, an unopened present, a gift no one wants.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

8. “And I can’t trust this world to teach their sons how to treat my daughter. So I will raise her to be a sword, a spear, a shield.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

9. “Maybe there are no words to say. I just want to be held.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

10. “If I say those words, if I snap apart the air with them, whatever is binding me together will split too.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

11. “You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

12. “Just the two of us. We can make it if we try.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

13. “Maybe, the only thing that has to make sense about being somebody’s friend is that you help them be their best self on any given day. That you give them a home when they don’t want to be in their own.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

14. “One thing I know for sure is that reputations last longer than the time it takes to make them.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

15. “Except. I once heard a rumor that goldfish have an evolutionary gene where they’ll only develop as big as the tank they’re put into. They need space to stretch. And I wonder if Twin and I are keeping each other small. Taking up the space that would have let the other grow.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

16. “There is freedom in coming and going for no other reason than because you can. There is freedom in choosing to sit and be still when everything is always telling you to move, move fast.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

17. “There is an artist my mother loved, Juan Gabriel, who was once asked in an interview if he was gay. His reply: What’s understood need not be said. I remember how Mami’s eyes fluttered to me like a bee on a flower acknowledging the pollen is sweet.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

18. “People say that you’re stuck with the family you’re born into. And for most people, that’s probably true. But we all make choices about people. Who we want to hold close, who we want to remain in our lives, and who we are just fine without.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

19. “In bed at night my fingers search a heat I have no name for.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

20. “I think you should write about the one that scares you most. Taking risks and making choices in spite of fear – it’s what makes our life story compelling.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

21. “It’s funny how the smallest moments are like dominoes lining up, being stacked with the purpose of knocking you on your ass. In a good way.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

22. “I feel like I’m being pulled in a hundred different directions and my feet are stuck in cement.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

23. “Maybe anger is like a river. Maybe it crumbles everything around it. Maybe it hides so many skeletons beneath the rolling surface.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

24. “It is ungrateful to feel like a burden. It is ungrateful to resent my own birth. I know that Twin and I are miracles. Aren’t we reminded every single day?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

25. “I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn’t that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

26. “I will never let anyone see my full heart and destroy it.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

27. “What’s the point of God giving me life, if I can’t live it as my own?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

28. “How can you lose an entire person, only to gain a part of them back in someone entirely new?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

29. “I will not stand still while the world makes my choices. This Yahaira will learn what carving your own way means.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

30. “Deadly and graceful, poised and ruthless. Quiet and cunning. A queen offers her hand to be kissed, and can form it into a fist while smiling the whole damn time.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

31. “Can you miss someone you never met? Of course, the answer is yes.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

32. “It’s the last day of school, I walk through the school hallways.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

33. “You can’t run from what hurts you or like a dog smelling fear that grief will just keep chasing with ever sharp teeth.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

34. “And I knew then what I’d known since my period came: my body was trouble. I had to pray the trouble out of the body God gave me. My body was a problem. And I didn’t want any of these boys to be the ones to solve it. I wanted to forget I had this body at all.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

35. “If my body was a Country Club soda bottle, it’s one that has been shaken and dropped and at any moment it’s gonna pop open and surprise the whole damn world.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

36. “The body is a funny piece of meat. How it inflates and deflates in order to keep you alive. But how simple words can fill you up or pierce the air out of you.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

37. “I’ve had a lot of things to feel ashamed about and I’ve learned most of them are other people’s problems, not mine.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

38. “But one thing I learned from the Saints, when the crossroads are open to you, you must decide a path. I will not stand still while the world makes my choices.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

39. “I close my eyes and let myself find in music what I’ve always searched for: a way away.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

40. “She knew since she was little, the world would not sing her triumphs, but she took all of the stereotypes and put them in a chokehold until they breathed out the truth.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

41. “And sometimes focusing on what you can control is the only way to lessen the pang in your chest when you think about the things you can’t.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

42. “She tells me words give people permission to be their fullest self and aren’t these the poems I most needed to hear?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

43. “Can you be from a place you have never been? You can find the island stamped all over me, but what would the island find if I was there? Can you claim a home that does not know you, much less claim you as its own?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

44. “My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pews wearing pretty florals and a soft smile. They got combat boots and a mouth silent until it’s sharp as an island machete.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

45. “Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too? You would burn me, wouldn’t you, if you could?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

46. “She would smile and say I was her premio for hard work, I was her premio for patience. And I loved being her reward. The golden trophy of her life. I just don’t know when I got too big for the appointed pedestal.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

47. “We’re wild women, flinging verses at each other like grenades in a battlefield, a cacophony of violent poems.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

48. “But even at the risk of burning, the moth always seeks the light.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

49. “Some days, when my feelings are like this, like a full pot of water with the fire on high, I don’t know what to cook. Plans and ideas escape my mind and instead I let my heart and hands take control, guided by a voice on the inside that tells me what goes where.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

50. “If there was one thing I learned once my belly started showing it’s that you can’t control how people look at you, but you can control how far back you pull your shoulders and how high you lift your chin.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo