Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Has anyone ever been watched with as much intensity as a beloved family member just out of rehab?”

— Yaa Gyasi

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.”

— Yaa Gyasi

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

121. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

123. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

129. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

131. “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