Top 200 Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

154. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

157. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

164. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

167. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

181. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

185. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

190. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

192. “The alone time was a blessing.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— Elizabeth Acevedo

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

— 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