Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “In a situation like this, how would anyone know so easily right from wrong when it seems we are all pivoting left, spinning in circles.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

102. “Remember anger is as much a sin as any Xiomara may have committed. We all need time to come to terms with certain things, don’t we?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

103. “Where we come from leaves its fingerprints all over us, and if you know how to read the signs of a place, you know a little bit more who someone is.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

104. “God just wants me to behave so I can earn being alive.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

105. “Burn it! Burn it. This is where the poems are,” I say, thumping a fist against my chest. “Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

106. “This is a place where two worlds collided: Beautiful because of the struggle that happened to create it, holy because of the belief people had in it, a home, a masterpiece of art, a mixture of different cultures.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

107. “She looks like the kind of woman who will break a stereotype down in the middle and hold one half up for white kids and one up for black ones. And maybe I’m stereotyping her, too.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

108. “The ultimate actress because I’m always pretending, pretending I’m blind, pretending I’m fine; I should win an Oscar I do it so well.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

109. “You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

110. “The closer we get to graduation, the more I feel like I want to be doing, not spending four years pretending to do.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

111. “And ain’t that what it means to be a sister? Holding things tight when the other one is falling apart?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

112. “She sings about how everything changes: the shallow and the profound, the shiny and the old. Everything but the love for home changes.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

113. “I feel like something has risen inside me too, and it tastes a bit like hope.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

114. “Life is an exchange; you’d think a chess player would know that.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

115. “Does anyone ever want to leave their home? The fresh fruit that drops from their backyard? The neighbors who wiped their snot? Does anyone ever want to believe they won’t come back? To the dog that sniffs their heel, to the bed that holds the echo of their body?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

116. “I told you before, sometimes following directions isn’t about stifling your creativity, it’s about showing respect. You have a complete disregard for the rules. That’s all well and good, when you’re a professional. But when you’re learning, you need to know the rules before you break them.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

117. “See, a cuero is any skin. A cuero is just a covering. A cuero is a loose thing. Tied down by no one. Fluttering and waving in the wind. Flying. Flying. Gone.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

118. “Ah, and that’s why it is magic. Not all recipes in life are easily understood or followed or deconstructed. Sometimes you have to take what is given to you and use your talents to brew the best tea possible.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

119. “It’s not like that anymore, but one thing I know for sure is that reputations last longer than the time it takes to make them. So I walk through metal detectors, and turn my pockets out, and greet security guards by name, and am one of hundreds who every day are sifted like flour through the doors. And I keep my head down, and I cause no waves. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this place is a place, neither safe nor unsafe, just a means, just a way to get closer to escape.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

120. “It’s like she’s a wooly mammoth whose most comfortable seat is my last nerve.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

121. “But I also got more than one city, one hood inside me. And anyone who wants to get to know me has to know how to appreciate the multiple skylines.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

122. “Although I lost so many poems, and I feel a pang every time I think about them burning, I’m also so proud of all I remember. I’m trying to convince myself rewriting means the words really mattered in the first place.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

123. “She’s also little – like, for real petite – but carries herself big, know what I mean? Like she’s used to shouldering her way through any assumptions made about her.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

124. “I imagine it’s kind of giving thanks. Of all the ways it could end it ends not with us in the sky or the water, but together on solid earth safely grounded.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

125. “You gotta make your home better; you don’t just run because you can.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

126. “Whatever we are to become, I’m glad that we can laugh through the uncomfortable moments.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

127. “No es lo bastante distinguido para un soneto, es demasiado elaborado para ser una escritura libre, y ocupa demasiado espacio en mis pensamientos para ser un haiku.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

128. “Who made this boy think I had time for him? Got me out here wasting all my good words. But then he smiles. Dimples popping out on both cheeks like billboards for joy and I stumble over my own feet.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

129. “And I know the past isn’t a mirror image of the future, but it’s a reflection of what can be; and when your first love breaks your heart, the shards of that can draw blood for a long, long time.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

130. “When you learn life altering news, you’re often in the most basic of places.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

131. “When I’m told girls Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. When I’m told To wait. To stop. To obey. When I’m told not to be like Delilah. Lot’s Wife. Eve. When the only girl I’m supposed to be was an impregnated virgin.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

132. “Doesn’t she know I still need her? That I still wish someone would look at the pieces of my life and tell me how to make sure they all fit back together?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

133. “I let go of a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I don’t know much about pathogens and storing sugar, but damn if I don’t know how to cook good food that makes people hungry for more, that makes people remember food is meant to feed more than an empty belly. It’s also meant to nourish your heart. And that’s one thing you won’t ever learn from no textbook.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

134. “She gives me my name bracelet back, the gold melded where it’d been broken, but still whole.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

135. “I feel like the sunlight sneaking over the hill is also sneaking inside me.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

136. “I don’t reduce, homies. The whole of me is Black. The whole of me is whole.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

137. “I’ve lived my whole life having people question what race I am. Not necessarily the homies I grew up with. In Fairhill, we are mostly Spanish-speaking Caribbeans and Philly-raised Black Americans with roots in the south.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

138. “My grandmother is a woman who is not afraid of tears or sharp things.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

139. “The only things working are my feet moving forward and my mind outracing my feet.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

140. “This was supposed to be a question. Not a poem confession or whatever it’s become. I just want to know if you would listen with me to the sound of our heartbeats.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

141. “And as she recites Scripture words tumble out of my mouth too, all of the poems and stanzas I’ve memorized spill out, getting louder and louder, all out of order, until I’m yelling at the top of my lungs, heaving the words like weapons from my chest...”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

142. “I peel my denim shorts off, wade in, slicing through as if by doing this I could cut to strips my breaking heart.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

143. “About a holy trinity that don’t include the mother.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

144. “And the more I write the braver I become.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

145. “I smiled back at her. Neither one of us looked the same. We looked like the thicker, gray-streaked, slightly less lost versions of ourselves we now were.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

146. “If I were on fire who could I count on to water me down? If I were a pile of ashes who could I count on to gather me in a pretty urn? If I were nothing but dust would anyone chase the wind trying to piece me back together?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

147. “I’ve learned to trust pretty words even less than a pretty face.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

148. “Sometimes I want to tell her, the only person in this house who isn’t heard is me.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

149. “Sometimes, when he talks about returning to Newark, he reminds me of my father. A love for home so deep, you go out into the world with the soul purpose of bringing the world back to your hood.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

150. “Rafa was seen at the karaoke bar performing a love song at a pining waitress. Rafa was seen at the billiards on 207th instructing a pretty young thing by pawing her too-large ass. Rafa was seen entering the apartment of the widow in 5D, and he emerged an hour later without his toolbox.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo