Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Whose story do we believe, then? We believe the one that has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”

— Yaa Gyasi

55. “Asante traders would bring in their captives. Fante, Ewe, or Ga middlemen would hold them, then sell them to the British or the Dutch or whoever was paying the most at the time. Everyone was responsible. We all were... we all are.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

57. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

89. “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

90. “Now I understand that we have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.”

— Yaa Gyasi

91. “You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind. Because.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

93. “Willie smiled at Robert, and it wasn’t until that smile that she realized she forgave him. She felt like the smile had opened a valve, like the pressure of anger and sadness and confusion and loss was shooting out of her, into the sky and away. Away.”

— Yaa Gyasi

94. “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

95. “Now, hearing Tansi speak, Afua resumed her crying, but it was as though no one heard. These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud. At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into the Atlantic.”

— Yaa Gyasi

96. “I haven’t changed, Willie,” Robert said to the wall. “No, but you ain’t the same neither,” she replied.”

— Yaa Gyasi

97. “A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.”

— Yaa Gyasi

98. “One-tenth of a centimeter is all that stood between pretty good and unimaginable sorrow.”

— Yaa Gyasi

99. “I couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched. I couldn’t imagine being willing, and even after those few stolen moments of psychedelic transcendence, nonaddictive, harmless, and, yes, euphoric, I still couldn’t imagine being free.”

— Yaa Gyasi

100. “Since moving to the Castle, she’d discovered that only the white men talked of “black magic.” As though magic had a color.”

— Yaa Gyasi