Akwaeke Emezi Quotes

Your parents are adult humans, Pet replied, pulling on the thought behind the words. Younger ones have fewer blocks about belief" -PET

If this story was a stack of photographs - the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country - it would start with Vivek's father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.

I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Look, I was a hungry shade, nothing more. I latched onto the men, and their energy felt like sticky fruit sliding between my fingers. and when we were done, I was still hungry. And after the next time. I was still hungry. And after the one after that one, I was still hungry. I would have drowned them all. I would have inched slowly over their bodies, dipped my fingers inside their throats and ripped out sounds. I filled their bed with secrets. Ada was right- I found pleasure in evil. I did many things in hunger that could be misconstrued.

It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn't even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.

But I've learned that you can't force forever on the wrong people. They belong exactly where they are, giving exactly what they want to. I don't ask for anything more. I figure I shouldn't have to.

They didn't believe in interfering with the child's imagination, and so when the Ada finished one of her many books and decided that she could talk to animals, no one corrected her. 'It did no harm to let her believe that,' Saul said, and the Ada continued to believe wildly, in Yshwa and fairies and pixies living in the flame of the forest blossoms.

The first step to seeing is seeing that there are things you do not see.

We wish she had saved it, but that is how humans are. Important things slip past in the moment, when it feels sharp and they are young enough to think that the feeling will remain.

We're afraid for you, they said. It's like you're on this thin line between being alive and being dead, like one small shift could send you either direction

This keeping of a secret, it is not a good thing to keep, you are keeping too many and they do not fit inside your heart, they will keep spaces between you and your humans" -PET

Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know.

He loves them as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering.

After Saachi left, the Ada sank even more into her books, by instinct, separating herself from this world and disappearing into others. She read everywhere: on the toilet, at the dining table, in the library before school assembly each morning. It is not clear how much saving these books were capable of.

Truth does not care if it feels true or not. It is true nonetheless" -Pet

The worst part of embodiment is being unseen.

You want many things, you are full of want, carved out of it, made from it, yes. But the truth does not care about what you want, the truth is what it is. It is not moved by want, it is not a blade of grass to be bent by the wind of your hopes and desires" -PET

Everyone, everything deserved some time to be. To figure out what they were. Even a painting.

Ikept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn't swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn't fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. I wanted to be as whole as that word.

So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.

It took a minute for Ada to understand, to realize that she was locked away, that all those parts of her he wanted, the parts she wanted to give, the parts that would complete the love they had- all those parts were gone. Or if they weren't gone , they'd been put somewhere so far away that not even Ada could touch them, let alone Ewan. I watched her face fall and when she started crying, I held her and whispered apologies for what felt like forever.

Understand this if you understand nothing: it is a powerful thing to be seen

Knowledge can do that to a person, Pet replied. I've seen it with you humans. The unseen can tear your eyes open when it comes into sight, and sometimes the mind behind that tears as well." -Pet

We came from somewhere - everything does. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed. It's a kindness. It would be cruel not to.

How fast is your alive? How smooth is your alive? How hard, how resilient? We're alive because we can be hurt; we're alive because we can heal. I think it's beautiful. It's why I fight.

Don't mind her," I whispered to Ada, looking back at the woman with hatred. "Who is she, sef? Stupid bitch." She's just a fucking human, I almost added, she doesn't even matter, none of this matters.

The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada?

When you break something, you must study the pattern of the shattering before you can piece it back together.

Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it's hard to believe in a better alternative.

Sometimes, you recognize truth because it destroys you for a bit.

Some people can't see softness without wanting to hurt it

We understood what was necessary -humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power. They do, however, understand forceful things, cruelties--they obey those.

The world in my head has been far more real than the one outside - maybe that's the exact definition of madness, come to think of it.

All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity is released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world--bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.

You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really, believe.

Bitter knew her name was heavy but she hadn't minded because it was honest. That was something she'd taught Jam - that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest. You could see things clearly if they were honest; you could decide what to do next, because you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

I had arrived, flesh from flesh, true blood from true blood. I was the wildness under the skin, the skin into a weapon, the weapon over the flesh.

She started to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her vision was numb. There was a window in front of her but it opened into a nothingness like the one yawning from her mouth. Somewhere she could hear a building sound, a wind, huge and wide, rushing out of the void, rushing toward her. The walls, the veils in her head, they tore, they ripped, they collapsed. The wind rushed over his empty voice and the Ada thought with a sudden final clarity--
She has come. She has come for me at last.

The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin.

What if you didn't think about what you wanted, what you hoped? What if you thought about what was happening instead? How does that change your wants?