Top 120 Yaa Gyasi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

128. “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

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

131. “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