Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “She doesn’t look like an American-apple-pie mother. She looks like a tres golpes of a mother...”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

160. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

164. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

168. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

174. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

176. “What better way to take a leap of faith than to set something on fire and trust it will not only come out right, but that it will be completely delicious?”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

177. “As if my Puerto Rican side cancels out any Blackness, although if we go only according to skin, my Puerto Rican side is as Black as my Black American side.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

180. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “Pastora had murmured that she would talk to her daughter, but in reality, she was struggling to approach this wake with as flippant an attitude as Flor seemed to have.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

190. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

192. “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

193. “All Yadi’s years in therapy had taught her to probe gently. She was also someone good with computers, who reluctantly agreed to make Flor a graphic she could forward in the family group chat.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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