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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

85. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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