Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

55. “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. Beulah ran in her sleep, ran like she’d stolen something, when really she had done nothing other than expect the peace, the clarity, that came with dreaming. Yes, Jo thought, this was where it started, but when, where, did it end?”

— Yaa Gyasi

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Marcus always nodded patiently when his father said things like this. Sonny was forever talking about slavery, the prison labor complex, the System, segregation, the Man. His father had a deep-seated hatred for white people. A hatred like a bag filled with stones, one stone for every year racial injustice continued to be the norm in America. He still carried the bag.”

— Yaa Gyasi

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “He had always said that the joining of a man and a woman was also the joining of two families. Ancestors, whole histories, came with the act, but so did sins and curses.”

— Yaa Gyasi

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Looking at us then, two laughing, playful children and their warm, doting father, it would be easy to assume that we’d all but forgotten what that man had yelled. That we’d forgotten we had any cares at all. But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”

— Yaa Gyasi

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “The man took a long drag off his Newport. “This helps,“he said, waving the cigarette in the air. He pulled out a small glassine bag from his pocket and placed it in Sonny’s hand. “When that don’t help, this do,” he said.”

— Yaa Gyasi

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.”

— Yaa Gyasi

89. “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

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. “If God was why, then Asamoah was yes and yes again.”

— Yaa Gyasi

92. “I had told SoCal surfer that I was getting my doctorate, but I hadn’t told him what I was getting it in because I didn’t want to scare him away. Neuroscience may have screamed “smart,” but it didn’t really scream “sexy.” Adding to that my blackness, maybe I was too much of an anomaly for him. He never called me back.”

— Yaa Gyasi

93. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

95. “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

96. “She is never fully safe in a country where doctors and researchers had no qualms about watching dozens of Black men die – slowly, brutally – simply because they could.”

— Yaa Gyasi

97. “Maybe he wouldn’t end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he’d be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

99. “My job is not to regulate your response to the truth – my job is to tell it.”

— Yaa Gyasi

100. “The Chin Chin Man hadn’t just left his father and his mother; he’d left his country as well, and he wouldn’t let my mother forget it.”

— Yaa Gyasi