Yaa Gyasi Quotes

#1. The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.

Yaa Gyasi

#2. in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.

Yaa Gyasi

#3. [...] here "white" could be the way a person talked; "black," the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.

Yaa Gyasi

#4. her grandmother reminding her how to come home.

Yaa Gyasi

#5. If we go to the white man for school ,we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.

Yaa Gyasi

#6. heat radiating off of his skin, coming

Yaa Gyasi

#7. But Jo wasn't angry. Not anymore. He couldn't really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.

Yaa Gyasi

#8. He felt the stone hit his chest, hard and hot, before finding its way up to the surface again. He touched it, surprised by its weight. Marjorie splashed him suddenly, laughing loudly before swimming away, toward the shore.

Yaa Gyasi

#9. but the older he got, the better he understood; forgiveness was an act done after the fact - a piece of the bad deeds future - and if you point the people's eyes to the future they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

Yaa Gyasi

#10. The need to call this thing "good" and this thing "bad," this thing "white" and this thing "black," was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.

Yaa Gyasi

#11. History is Storytelling.

Yaa Gyasi

#12. My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.

Yaa Gyasi

#13. She continued. "I love my people, James," she said, and his name on her tongue was indescribably sweet. "I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers, I decided that as for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation.

Yaa Gyasi

#14. Then next time bring more water, but don't cry for this time. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?

Yaa Gyasi

#15. 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

#16. she soon found herself shouting in Twi, "I'm from Ghana, stupid. Can't you see?" The boy didn't stop his English. "But you come from America?" Angry, she kept walking. Her backpack straps were heavy against her shoulders, and she knew they would leave marks.

Yaa Gyasi

#17. We believe the one who 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

#18. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

Yaa Gyasi

#19. 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

#20. ... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.

Yaa Gyasi

#21. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like

Yaa Gyasi

#22. Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I

Yaa Gyasi

#23. I haven't changed, Willie," Robert said to the wall. "No, but you ain't the same neither," she replied.

Yaa Gyasi

#24. Everything was brilliant here, even the ground. Everywhere

Yaa Gyasi

#25. When he was young, his father told him that black people didn't like water because they were brought over on slave ships. What did a black man want to swim for? The ocean floor was already littered with black men.

Yaa Gyasi

#26. He didn't miss what he didn't know, what he couldn't feel in his hands or his heart.

Yaa Gyasi

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

Yaa Gyasi

#28. 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

#29. The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.

Yaa Gyasi

#30. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came. The

Yaa Gyasi

#31. 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

#32. You keep doin' what you doin' and the white man don't got to do it no more. He ain't got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He'll own you just as is, and he'll say you the one who did it. He'll say it's your fault.

Yaa Gyasi

#33. 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

#34. I decided that for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation."
As James listened to her speak, he felt something well up inside him as it had never done before. If he could, he would listen to her speak forever. If he could, he would join that nation she spoke of.

Yaa Gyasi

#35. Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.

Yaa Gyasi

#36. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?" She

Yaa Gyasi

#37. Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don't fit here or there. My

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#38. It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath. And

Yaa Gyasi

#39. You was always so angry. Even as a child, you was angry. I

Yaa Gyasi

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. You can learn anything when you have to learn it. You could learn how to fly if it meant you would live another day.

Yaa Gyasi

#43. Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.

Yaa Gyasi

#44. He said that people need time in order to be able to see things clearly.

Yaa Gyasi

#45. Everything made him want to cry. He could see the differences between them as long ravines, impossible to cross. He was old; she was young. He was educated; she was not. He was scarred; she was whole. Each difference split the ravine wider and wider still. There was no way. And

Yaa Gyasi

#46. 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

#47. Took me a long time to figure out that you was born to a man who could choose his life, but you wouldn't never be able to choose yours, and it seemed like you was born knowing that.

Yaa Gyasi

#48. what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it - not apart from it, but inside of it.

Yaa Gyasi

#49. Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him. Months

Yaa Gyasi

#50. Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.

Yaa Gyasi

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind's eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect

Yaa Gyasi

#55. Once the woman decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free... The older Jo =got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.

Yaa Gyasi

#56. 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