Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “And now his smile is a little sad. And I think about all the things we could be if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.”

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

106. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

108. “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

109. “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

110. “Every day I searched for new songs, and it was like applying for asylum. I just needed someone to help me escape from all the silence. I just needed people saying words about all the things that hurt them. And maybe this is why Papi stopped listening to music, because it can make your body want to rebel. To speak up. And even that young I learned music can become a bridge between you and a total stranger.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

111. “And I try to tell myself the same thing: forward is the only direction to go in; turning back around is for the birds.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

115. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

117. “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

118. “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

119. “You’re with a man who has never appreciated the everything of a wonderful woman. It is beyond him.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

123. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

126. “The world is a turntable that never stops spinning; as humans we merely choose the tracks we want to sit out and the ones that inspire us to dance.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

130. “Papi extended it to Mama. She said he had his heart in it.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

132. “The Divine does not live in fear, and the godly lives in each of us. This is one journey, and beyond this there is another. There is no veil between this world and that one. They are the same world, the one before, this one, the one that comes next, a string of pearls, ends tied so tightly you cannot feel the knot that binds.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

134. “Because her hands will be scraped raw from work but she still folds them to pray.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

135. “To make myself feel this way is a dirty thing, right? Then why does it feel so good?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

137. “We look beautiful and hood and excited to see the world, and none of us are hiding from this world seeing us.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

138. “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

139. “Does anyone ever want to leave the place they love?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

140. “I was that girl your moms warns you about being friends with. And warns you about becoming.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

141. “If the game taught me one thing, it’s once you lift a pawn off the board, you have to move it forward. It cannot return where it was.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

142. “My Aunt Sara says it’s in our blood, an innate need to tell a story through food. ‘Buela says it’s definitely a blessing, magic.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

143. “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

144. “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

145. “I love them, I love you, You are the only thing that does not hurt.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

147. “Maybe my relationship with pornography was complicated, but I wouldn’t let Jeremiah or anyone make it uglier than it felt in the moments it didn’t feel good.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

148. “I would take that beating again to be with him.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

149. “When your body takes up more room than your voice.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

150. “I wanted to speak to the most protective man in my life.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo