Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I will not stand still while the world makes my choices.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

156. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

162. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

164. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

166. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

179. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

187. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

200. “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