Top 60 Kiese Laymon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.”

— Kiese Laymon

2. “Before both of us went to sleep, I asked Grandmama if 218 pounds was too fat for twelve years old. “What you weighing yourself for anyway?” she asked me. “Two hundred eighteen pounds is just right, Kie. It’s just heavy enough.” “Heavy enough for what?” “Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for.”

— Kiese Laymon

3. “We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.”

— Kiese Laymon

4. “I asked Grandmama why she whupped me on my legs when I was doing quick feet, and not my head or my neck or my back like you would. “Because I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I want you to act like you got good sense but I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

— Kiese Laymon

5. “And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry.”

— Kiese Laymon

6. “Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can swim either.”

— Kiese Laymon

7. “I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.”

— Kiese Laymon

8. “I loved all my teachers, and I wanted all my teachers to love us. I knew they weren’t being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish. But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them how to respect where we’d been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.”

— Kiese Laymon

9. “Most groups of men I knew were good at destroying women and girls who would do everything not to destroy them.”

— Kiese Laymon

10. “Y’all taught me that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.”

— Kiese Laymon

11. “The violent white backlash to Obama’s victory will still be unlike anything we’d ever seen...”

— Kiese Laymon

12. “Your heart was good but you forgot to guard it. You killed yourself slowly because of this. The heart is the true measure of a man or woman. I loved you and I know that you knew I loved you. We all have addictions. Some are just more obvious to the eye. We are all dying, but we are all living.”

— Kiese Laymon

13. “I didn’t understand hell, partially because I didn’t believe any place could be hotter than Mississippi in August. But I understood feeling good. I did not feel good at Concord Missionary Baptist church. I felt good watching Grandmama and her friends love each other during Home Mission.”

— Kiese Laymon

14. “Your gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision are why I started this book thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. In spite of those gifts, or maybe because of those gifts, it’s important for me to accept, that like all American children, I’ve been brutally dishonest with you. And like all American parents, you’ve been brutally dishonest with me.”

— Kiese Laymon

15. “How do you get good at love when your family disappeared and every day it feels like you and your friends are getting written off the face of the earth?”

— Kiese Laymon

16. “Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.”

— Kiese Laymon

17. “Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.”

— Kiese Laymon

18. “I pledge to never be passive, patriotic, or grateful in the face of American abuse.”

— Kiese Laymon

19. “Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.”

— Kiese Laymon

20. “I knew the big boys would tell stories about what happened in Daryl’s bedroom that were good for all three of them and sad for her in three vastly different ways.”

— Kiese Laymon

21. “On the way home, I wanted to ask you if we were deserving of different kinds of liberation, different modes of memory, different policy, different practices, and different relationships to honesty. I wanted to ask you if we were also deserving of different books. I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.”

— Kiese Laymon

22. “Back then I wanted all my seasons to be Mississippi seasons, no matter how strange, hot, or terrifying. Now I felt something else. I didn’t want to float in, under, and around all the orange-red stars in our galaxy if our galaxy was Mississippi. I wanted to look at Mississippi from other stars and I didn’t ever want to come home again.”

— Kiese Laymon

23. “We all broken, I said. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we’re gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it’s possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.”

— Kiese Laymon

24. “This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.”

— Kiese Laymon

25. “I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms.”

— Kiese Laymon

26. “We black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom.”

— Kiese Laymon

27. “It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel.”

— Kiese Laymon

28. “For a few seconds, I remembered that the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together. I remember that it was easier to promise than it was to reckon or change.”

— Kiese Laymon

29. “Both of y’all knew, and showed me, how we didn’t even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us to.”

— Kiese Laymon

30. “The land, Kie,” she said. “We work too hard on this land to run. Some of us, we believe the land will one day be free.”

— Kiese Laymon

31. “I took out my brush and got to brushing the waves on the back of my head.”

— Kiese Laymon

32. “It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.”

— Kiese Laymon

33. “Some days the tears just be pouring out my eyes, but Grandmama and is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as somebody worth respecting.”

— Kiese Laymon

34. “The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, “You’re trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.”

— Kiese Laymon

35. “Do you ever just feel lonely? I feel like I walk around the world raw, Kie. It’s hard to open up when you’re already open, and people just never get tired of sticking their nasty hands into that raw.”

— Kiese Laymon

36. “I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I’ve done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.”

— Kiese Laymon

37. “If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.”

— Kiese Laymon

38. “I knew, truth be told, that a present American man would likely teach me how to be a present American man. and I couldn’t imagine how those teachings would have made me healthier or more generous.”

— Kiese Laymon

39. “But the Bible was better than those other spinach-colored Classic books that spent most of their time flossing with long sentences about pastures and fake sunsets and white dudes named Spencer. I didn’t hate on spinach, fake sunsets, or white dudes named Spencer, but you could just tell that whoever wrote the sentences in those books never imagined they’d be read by Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, my cousins, or anyone I’d ever met.”

— Kiese Laymon

40. “Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn’t in the gym to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat I looked and felt.”

— Kiese Laymon

41. “Dave, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie, was a felon because he was black, scared, desperate, and guilty. My student Cole, a heroin user and dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, is a college student because he’s white, wealthy, scared, desperate, and guilty.”

— Kiese Laymon

42. “Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have paid more than their fair share, and our nation owes them and their children, and their children’s children, a lifetime of healthy choices and second chances. That would be responsible.”

— Kiese Laymon

43. “I will not misdirect or manipulate human beings... especially those human beings who love me enough to risk being misdirected or manipulated. I will not misdirect or manipulate myself... I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful. I will not give my blessings away. I will love myself enough to be honest when I fail at loving.”

— Kiese Laymon

44. “I’d never imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.”

— Kiese Laymon

45. “In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than.”

— Kiese Laymon

46. “Don’t be good,” you said across the space between us, “Be perfect. Be fantastic”.”

— Kiese Laymon

47. “The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.”

— Kiese Laymon

48. “He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.”

— Kiese Laymon

49. “And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folk watched black folk watch us watch him.”

— Kiese Laymon

50. “For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.”

— Kiese Laymon