Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people, but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.”

— Yaa Gyasi

52. “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

53. “I still wanted my sins. I still wanted my childhood, my freedom to fall asleep in big church with little consequence. I didn’t know what would become of me once I crossed the line from sinner to saved.”

— Yaa Gyasi

54. “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

55. “Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.”

— Yaa Gyasi

56. “Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house.”

— Yaa Gyasi

57. “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

58. “Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.”

— Yaa Gyasi

59. “She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi’s unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother’s heart.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

61. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

63. “Sonny would tell Marcus about how America used to lock up black men off the sidewalks for labor or how redlining kept banks from investing in black neighborhoods, preventing mortgages or business loans. So was it a wonder that prisons were still full of them? Was it a wonder that the ghetto was the ghetto?”

— Yaa Gyasi

64. “I mostly just feel like I don’t belong there. As soon as I step off the airplane, people can tell that I’m like them but different too. They can smell it on me.” “Smell what?” Marjorie looked up, trying to capture the right word. “Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there. My grandmother’s the only person who really sees me.”

— Yaa Gyasi

65. “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become – a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain.”

— Yaa Gyasi

66. “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

67. “The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended, and his father did not seem to think that it would end. 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

68. “Her mother often joked that Marjorie must have been birthed from a cocoa nut, split open and wide.”

— Yaa Gyasi

69. “And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”

— Yaa Gyasi

70. “When I was very little, my mother took to calling me asaa, the miracle berry that, when eaten first, turns sour things sweet. Asaa in context is a miracle berry. Without context, it is nothing, does nothing. The sour fruit remains.”

— Yaa Gyasi

71. “She used the word akuraase, the same word she would use for a village in Ghana, but I had already been conditioned to see America as somehow elevated in relation to the rest of the world, and so I was convinced that an Alabama village couldn’t be an akuraase in the same way that a Ghanaian village could.”

— Yaa Gyasi

72. “This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.”

— Yaa Gyasi

73. “I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness.”

— Yaa Gyasi

74. “Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me.”

— Yaa Gyasi

75. “Marjorie wondered if she was in love. How could she know? How did anyone know? In middle school she had been into Victorian literature, the sweeping romance of it. Every character in those books was hopelessly in love. All the men were wooing, all the women being wooed. It was easier to see what love looked like then, the embarrassingly grand, unabashed emotion of it. Now, did it look like sitting in a Camry, sipping whiskey?”

— Yaa Gyasi

76. “The older Jo got, the more he understood about the woman called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.”

— Yaa Gyasi

77. “Has anyone ever been watched with as much intensity as a beloved family member just out of rehab?”

— Yaa Gyasi

78. “He runs his hands along her scabby back, and she does the same along his, and as they work together, clutching each other, some scars reopen. They are both bleeding now, both bride and bridegroom, in this unholy holy union.”

— Yaa Gyasi

79. “Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta so is say you was. That’s all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round free as can be. Don’t nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin’ proud as a peacock. Like you ain’t got a lick of fear in you.”

— Yaa Gyasi

80. “They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid?”

— Yaa Gyasi

81. “A lioness. She mates with her lion and he thinks the moment is about him when it is really about her, her children, her posterity. Her tricki s to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what he does a king matter? Really, she is king and queen and everything in between.”

— Yaa Gyasi

82. “When I was very little, my mother took to calling me asaa, the miracle berry that, when eaten first, turns sour things sweet. Asaa in context is a miracle berry. Without context, it is nothing, does nothing. The sour fruit remains. In those early years of our family of four, sour fruit was everywhere, but I was asaa and Nana was context, and so we had sweetness in abundance.”

— Yaa Gyasi

83. “I think we’re made out of stardust and God made the stars,” I said. I blew and yellow dust flew into the air, into Anne’s hair, and she looked at me like I was crazy, and she saw me.”

— Yaa Gyasi

84. “As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.”

— Yaa Gyasi

85. “Maybe Beulah was seeing something more clearly on the nights she had these dreams, a little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn’t name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness.”

— Yaa Gyasi

86. “What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets.”

— Yaa Gyasi

87. “Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.”

— Yaa Gyasi

88. “Was it lurking there again, the dark, deep sadness, or was it just the everyday kind, the kind we all have from time to time, the kind that comes and, more important, goes?”

— Yaa Gyasi

89. “She thought about H coming home every night from the mines with his pickax and his shovel. He would set them down on the porch and take his boots off before he came in because Ethe would give him an earful if he tracked coal dust into the house she kept so clean. He used to say the best part of his day was when he could put that shovel down and walk inside to see his girls waiting for him.”

— Yaa Gyasi

90. “If she slept, she would do so only lightly, dipping the ladle of sleep into the shallow pool of dreamland.”

— Yaa Gyasi

91. “The practice of segregation still meant that Sonny had to see white people sitting at the front of every bus he took, that he got called “boy” by every other snot-nosed white kid in sight. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.”

— Yaa Gyasi

92. “But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?”

— Yaa Gyasi

93. “I think that I remember that day, but I don’t know if I’ve just turned my mother’s stories about it into memories or if I’ve stared at that picture long enough that my own stories started to emerge.”

— Yaa Gyasi

94. “Other children would be sent to England for school and they would come back to form an elite class.” Next to him, Marjorie shifted her weight, and Marcus tried not to look at her. It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath.”

— Yaa Gyasi

95. “Quey had wanted to cry, but the desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness or his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.”

— Yaa Gyasi

96. “No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.” The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.”

— Yaa Gyasi

97. “We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body.”

— Yaa Gyasi

98. “Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.”

— Yaa Gyasi

99. “Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy.”

— Yaa Gyasi

100. “This feeling came from time to time. Her grandmother called it a premonition, the body registering something that the world had yet to acknowledge. Marjorie.”

— Yaa Gyasi