Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Yadi once caught her like that, chewing the cartilage of a chicken bone, the smooth ivory picked clean. It’s one of the memories Yadi liked to use when she told people why she’d become plant-based: her mother, standing over a plate that was not her own, addicted to meat to the point that she had reduced herself to scavenging.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

154. “When your body takes up more room than your voice you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my knuckles talk for me.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

155. “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

156. “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

157. “They are failed by a culture that writes them off as criminal so that they must create their own internal laws. I don’t argue they are freedom fighters. Or are undoing enslavement. I only mean, on this side of the world, every descendent of enslavement, of that inherited and invasive oppression, dreams of an island of their own, a slice of communal freedom, a hard-won respite from a world that reminds them time and time again they are destined to be shackled from every angle.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

158. “Says the girl who never met a past boo she wanted to leave in the past. Every one of your breakups lasted a hundred years.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

159. “I’ve forced my skin as thick as I am.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

160. “Ancestors as always I write to you, for you, with you, carrying the utmost love and reverence. Thank you for wedging open so many doorways that have led to my wildest dreams. I promise to continue walking through them.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

162. “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

163. “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

164. “The fake sweet smile she was wearing has cannonballed clear off her face into a pool of confusion.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

165. “But I learned young, you do not speak of the dying as if they are already dead.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

166. “Epigraph won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. – “won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

167. “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

168. “Nothing, not even making love, had ever arrived me to my own body like growing another person. It was primal, physical, the sensations that became new to me. I would wake up and brush my teeth, and the moment the toothbrush touched my tongue I would begin to gag.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

169. “But just know, I think you have more to offer the world than you give yourself credit for.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

171. “The whole of me is black. The whole of me is whole.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

172. “Who made this boy think I had time for him? Got me out here wasting all my good words.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

173. “Taking risks and making choices in spite of ear – it’s what makes our life story compelling” -Ms. Fuentes.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

174. “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

175. “I just know whatever it is, I want it to be major. I want to be remembered for something great. I want to leave a skyscraper-sized mark on the world...”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

176. “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

177. “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

178. “The older sisters all had tacky taste: brocade curtains and brightly painted accent walls, mimicking the tropical colonial style of the country they’d left behind and the era in which they’d left it. Camila didn’t need textile reminders of home. She’d arrived like a bird that was molting.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

179. “But I’ll never know. What I would have said.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

180. “I will not stand still while the world makes my choices.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

181. “She’d rented the hottest nightclub in the Bronx for her fiftieth birthday. Her English was more proficient than all her siblings’, and she made use of it in her approximation of a Dominican-York socialite.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

182. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

184. “You’re a nice man, Steve. So kind. I’m going to tell my grandmother to pray for you.” And I hope he can see in my face that I just sprinkled the juju of a spiteful Puerto Rican grandmother all over his life.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

185. “Gladly. And El Pico Duarte is in the other direction.” She pointed with her lips. “You could still be a good person, Santana. It isn’t too late. Even if you are a compulsive, manipulative liar.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

186. “He is not elegant enough for a sonnett, too well-thought-out for a free write, taking too much space in my thoughts to ever be a haiku.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

187. “The moment stretches into the yard beyond awkward and enters the goal post of embarrassing.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

188. “It’s silly to have a nickname for a nickname, but we’d always loved taking apart each other’s names and seeing how else we could arrange the letters into love.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

190. “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

191. “It was the first time in their relationship she had the thought that life to him was only a great big joke he loved telling and was too self-centered to realize no one joined him in the laughter.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

192. “Mainly because she knew it took steady hands to keep a dream afloat, and while Yadi’s hands were inspired, they also trembled.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

193. “This stuff is complicated. But it’s like i’m some long division problem folks keep wanting to parcel into pieces, and they don’t reduce, homies. The whole of me is Black. The whole of me is whole.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

194. “We all smile at Babygirl, who shows off her teeth as if she knows she has a coven of women holding her down, and that she can be anything and everything we dream for her.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

195. “So, your cobbler traveled from the South of the US to the south of the Iberian Peninsula! I let the peaches sit in the juice of some sour oranges and added apricots, and the patrons at the restaurant I’m working at gobbled it up before the lunch rush was over!”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

196. “She rolled her eyes. Just like a man, about to kick the bucket and still making his descendants kiss his hand. And before he was even in a casket!”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

197. “What are arms in the water if not wings?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

199. “It’s a strange thing to become a mom when the only example you ever had wasn’t even your own mother.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

200. “I wanted to give him a laundry list of the symptoms I’d felt in my body that day: a cramp in my right side, tender breasts, and high irritability. I might be ovulating right this moment, and I didn’t have time for an argument. We didn’t.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo