Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And ain’t that what it means to be a sister? Holding things tight when the other one is falling apart?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

102. “My hands learned how to bleed when other kids tried to make him into a wound.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

103. “Make poems from the sharp feelings inside, that feel like they could carve me wide open.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

104. “There is freedom in choosing to sit and be still when everything is always telling you to move, move fast.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

105. “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

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

— 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. “She doesn’t look like an American-apple-pie mother. She looks like a tres golpes of a mother...”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

116. “Swimming might be the closest to flying a human being can get. There is something about your body displacing water in order to propel through space that makes you feel Godtouched. That makes me understand evolution, that we really must have crawled up from the sea.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

118. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

125. “She knows me in ways I don’t have to explain.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

126. “It happens when I wear shorts. It happens when I wear jeans. It happens when I stare at the ground. It happens when I stare ahead. It happens when I’m walking. It happens when I’m sitting. It happens when I’m on my phone. It simply never stops.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

128. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

134. “She tells me words give people permission to be their fullest self.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

135. “I might have gone a little overboard today buying some new spices- I swear I can spend all day at the supermarket. I especially love the one in our neighborhood that brings in ingredients straight from the island. I get to walk the aisles and pick up herbs and peppers from all over the world, thinking of all the ways to remix my favorite dishes.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

136. “It is a tiring thing to have to continue forgiving a father who is no longer here.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

137. “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

138. “When your body takes up more room than your voice, you are always the target of well-aimed rumors.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

139. “I am afraid that I would break her. Am afraid that I would break.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

140. “I’m constantly having to give people geography and history lessons on how my grandmother’s hometown is 65 percent Afro–Puerto Rican, on how the majority of slaves were dropped off in the Caribbean and Latin America, on how just because our Black comes with bomba and mofongo doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. And it seems I’m always defending the parts of me that I’ve inherited from my mother:.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

142. “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

143. “How does the water learn to readjust around the new object?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

144. “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

145. “I am theirs. You can see them on me. But I am also all mine, mostly.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

146. “The conversations with her siblings and daughter felt fraught with the questions of life and death. She hadn’t meant to mine everyone else’s life experiences. She’d only meant to make room for her own.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

147. “And anyone who wants to get to know me has to know how to appreciate multiple skylines.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

148. “It is strange to go from being an only child to seeing someone wearing your own face.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

149. “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

150. “I take in the large churches, the tall buildings that look like elegant wedding cakes, the city center and monuments. As we leave the city behind, I watch the landscape as Malachi naps with his head on my shoulder. I see so many green fields and squat trees with purple flowers and I find them all beautiful, but then, I doze off, too.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo