Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History is Storytelling.”

— Yaa Gyasi

2. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him! And I’ll reply, Psalms 34:8.”

— Yaa Gyasi

3. “Surely, there’s strength in being dressed for a storm, even when there’s no storm in sight?”

— Yaa Gyasi

4. “The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”

— Yaa Gyasi

5. “If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as prayer.”

— Yaa Gyasi

6. “What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.”

— Yaa Gyasi

7. “The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.”

— Yaa Gyasi

8. “I learned absolutely nothing, but some minor adjustment was made within me, some imperceptible shift that occurs only when I encounter wonder and awe, the best art.”

— Yaa Gyasi

9. “In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.”

— Yaa Gyasi

10. “They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.”

— Yaa Gyasi

11. “My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.”

— Yaa Gyasi

12. “I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.”

— Yaa Gyasi

13. “His free papers named him Kojo Freeman. Free man. Half the ex-slaves in Baltimore had the name. Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth.”

— Yaa Gyasi

14. “The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.”

— Yaa Gyasi

15. “If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”

— Yaa Gyasi

16. “Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.”

— Yaa Gyasi

17. “Church gossip is as old as the church itself, and oh how my church loved to gossip.”

— Yaa Gyasi

18. “Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.”

— Yaa Gyasi

19. “Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here “white” could be the way a person talked; “black the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.”

— Yaa Gyasi

20. “She continued. “I love my people, James,” she said, and his name on her tongue was indescribably sweet. “I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers, I decided that as for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation.”

— Yaa Gyasi

21. “And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

— Yaa Gyasi

22. “No, her scarred skin was like another body in and of itself, shaped like a man hugging her from behind with his arms hanging around her neck. They went up from her breasts, rounded the hills of her shoulders, and traveled the full, proud length of her back. They licked the top of her buttocks before trailing away into nothing. Ness’s skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder.”

— Yaa Gyasi

23. “What have I told you about death?” Old Lady said sharply into the phone, her voice sounding stronger than it had at the beginning of their conversation. Marjorie tugged at the cord. Old Lady said that only bodies died. Spirits wandered. They found Asamando, or they didn’t. They stayed with their descendants to guide them through life, to comfort them, sometimes to scare them into waking from their fog of unloving, unliving.”

— Yaa Gyasi

24. “There’s more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It’s a question of who will own the land, the people, the power. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”

— Yaa Gyasi

25. “Just because someone sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.”

— Yaa Gyasi

26. “A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.”

— Yaa Gyasi

27. “Be careful of fire. Know when to use it and when to stay cold,” she.”

— Yaa Gyasi

28. “He said that people need time in order to be able to see things clearly.”

— Yaa Gyasi

29. “The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.”

— Yaa Gyasi

30. “Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.”

— Yaa Gyasi

31. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

— Yaa Gyasi

32. “But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”

— Yaa Gyasi

33. “It wasn’t like he hadn’t asked himself the same thing a hundred times or more. How many times could he pick himself up off the dirty floor of a jail cell? How many hours could he spend marching? How many bruises could he collect from the police? How many letters to the mayor, governor, president could he send? How many more days would it take to get something to change? And when it changed, would it change? Would America be any different, or would it be mostly the same? For.”

— Yaa Gyasi

34. “It was only when Effia didn’t speak or question, when she made herself small, that she could feel Baaba’s love, or something like it. Maybe this was what Abeeku wanted too.”

— Yaa Gyasi

35. “It should have been obvious to us. We should have seen it coming, but we didn’t see what we didn’t want to see.”

— Yaa Gyasi

36. “Since moving to the Castle, she’d discovered that only the white men talked of “black magic.” As though magic had a color. Effia had seen a traveling witch who carried a snake around her neck and shoulders. This woman had had a son. She’d sung lullabies to him at night and held his hands and kept him fed, same as anyone else. There was nothing dark about her.”

— Yaa Gyasi

37. “Being saved, I was taught when I was a child, was a way of saying, Sinner that I am, sinner that I will ever be, I relinquish control of my life to He who knows more than I, He who knows everything. It is not a magical moment of becoming sinless, blameless, but rather it’s a way of saying, Walk with me.”

— Yaa Gyasi

38. “As she sang, she saw the notes float out of her mouth like little butterflies, carrying some of her sadness away, and she knew, finally, that she would survive it. – Soon.”

— Yaa Gyasi

39. “The night Effia Otcher was born into he musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound.”

— Yaa Gyasi

40. “Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether.”

— Yaa Gyasi

41. “This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She.”

— Yaa Gyasi

42. “Then next time bring more water, but don’t cry for this time. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”

— Yaa Gyasi

43. “For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.”

— Yaa Gyasi

44. “Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.”

— Yaa Gyasi

45. “A story is only a lie you get away with.”

— Yaa Gyasi

46. “She would always associate real love with a hardness of spirit.”

— Yaa Gyasi

47. “And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.”

— Yaa Gyasi

48. “I was accustomed to being alone at home but this, this false aloneness, was so much worse than any loneliness I had ever felt before. Knowing that my mother was in the house, knowing that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, get out of the bed to be near me, to help me in my sadness, made me angry and then my anger made me feel guilty, and so on and so on, in a terrible loop.”

— Yaa Gyasi

49. “She walked to where he stood, where the fire met the water. He took her hand and they both looked out into the abyss of it. The fear that Marcus had felt inside the Castle was still there, but he knew it was like the fire, a wild thing that could still be controlled, contained.”

— Yaa Gyasi

50. “You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

— Yaa Gyasi