Best 28 quotes of Yaa Gyasi on MyQuotes

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?

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

As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.

[...] because she wanted to be alone while surrounded by people.

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.

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn't segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.

he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.

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.

History is Storytelling.

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

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.

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

Og hvis han hamrede bogen ned i bordet, ville alle i rummet glo, og de ville ikke se andet end hans hudfarve og hans vrede, og så ville de tro, de vidste noget om ham, og det ville være det samme noget, som havde legitimeret at smide hans oldefar H i fængsel, men det ville også være anderledes, mindre åbenlyst, end det engang var.

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.

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.

She has spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is.

Since moving to the Castle, she'd discovered that only the white men talked of "black magic." As though magic had a color.

There are women down there who look like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.

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.

The white man's god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame of Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good? They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?

The white man's god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and tat thing was really good?

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?

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. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.

Tu veux savoir ce qu'est la faiblesse ? C'est de traiter quelqu'un comme s'il t'appartenait. La force est de savoir qu'il n'appartient qu'à lui-même.

We are all weak most of the time,' she said finally. 'Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.' She smiled at him. 'But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.

We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.

We someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

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, Homegoing