Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “People think they are coming to me for advice,” Mampanyin said, “but really, they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it.”

— Yaa Gyasi

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

110. “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

111. “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

112. “They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.”

— Yaa Gyasi

113. “She was missing all but her four front teeth, evenly spaced, as though they had chased all of the other teeth out of her mouth and then joined together in the middle, triumphant.”

— Yaa Gyasi

114. “Here in this country, it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now and here black is black is black.”

— Yaa Gyasi

115. “He didn’t miss what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t feel in his hands or his heart.”

— Yaa Gyasi

116. “My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core.”

— Yaa Gyasi

117. “I’d met him on OkCupid. He had straw-blond hair, skin perpetually at the end phase of a sunburn. He looked like a SoCal surfer. The entire time we’d messaged back and forth I’d wondered if I was the first black girl he’d ever asked out, if he was checking some kind of box off his list of new and exotic things he’d like to try, like the Korean food in front of us, which he had already given up on.”

— Yaa Gyasi

118. “It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

120. “The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.”

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

122. “Life is sweet and it pleases the eye to see the sun.”

— Yaa Gyasi

123. “I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think, then what is ‘us’? Do you believe in souls? I was breathless.”

— Yaa Gyasi

124. “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

125. “But there was no war in my mother’s stories, and if there was hunger, it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy.”

— Yaa Gyasi

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

130. “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

131. “It was the butt that had done it nineteen years ago, was still doing it now. He’d seen it coming around Strawberry Alley and had followed it four whole blocks. It was mesmerizing, the way it moved, independent of the rest of her body, as though operating under the influencer of another brain entirely, one cheek knocking into the other cheek so that that cheek had to swing out before knocking back.”

— Yaa Gyasi