Yaa Gyasi Quotes

It wasn't like he hadn't asked himself the same thing a hundred times or more. How many times could he pick himself up off the dirty floor of a jail cell? How many hours could he spend marching? How many bruises could he collect from the police? How many letters to the mayor, governor, president could he send? How many more days would it take to get something to change? And when it changed, would it change? Would America be any different, or would it be mostly the same? For

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.

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

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.

You are a sinner and a heathen," he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. "Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and heathen, like you."
Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated.
"All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.

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.

She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi's unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother's heart.

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.

What I know now, my son: 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'm sorry you have suffered. I'm sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.

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?

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.

It was only when Effia didn't speak or question, when she made herself small, that she could feel Baaba's love, or something like it. Maybe this was what Abeeku wanted too.

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

Yaw realised that it was not his scar that terrified her, but rather the problem of language, a marker of her education, her class, compared with his. She had been terrified that for the teacher of the white book, she would have to speak the white tongue. Now, released from English, Esther smiled more brightly than Yaw had seen anyone smile in ages. He could see the large, proud gap that stood in the doorway between her two front teeth, and he found himself training his gaze through that door as though he could see all the way down into her throat, her gut, the home of her very soul.

And so the broken family nestled into one another, each hoping the others' presences would fill the wound their personal war had left behind.

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.

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.

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?

How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part 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 it.

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.

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

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?

And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[...] 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.

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

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

When he finally lifted his head up from the sea to cough, then breathe, he looked out at all the water before him, at the vast expanse of time and space. He could hear Marjorie laughing, and soon, he laughed too. When he finally reached her, she was moving just enough to keep her head above water. The black stone necklace rested just below her collarbone and Marcus watched the glints of gold come off it, shining in the sun. "Here," Marjorie said. "Have it." She lifted the stone from her neck, and placed it around Marcus's. "Welcome home.

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.

Split the Castle open,
find me, find you.
We, two, felt sand,
wind, air.
One felt whip. Whipped,
Once shipped.
We, two, black.
Me, you.
One grew from
cocoa's soil, birthed from nut,
skin uncut, still bleeding.
We two, wade.
The waters seem different
but are same.
Our same. Sister skin.
Who knew? Not me. Not you

her grandmother reminding her how to come home.

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

Don't matter if you was or wasn't. All they gotta so is say you was. That's all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can't stand the sight of you. Walkin' round free as can be. Don't nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin' proud as a peacock. Like you ain't got a lick of fear in you

The man took a long drag off his Newport. "This helps,"he said, waving the cigarette in the air. He pulled out a small glassine bag from his pocket and placed it in Sonny's hand. "When that don't help, this do," he said.

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.

They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.

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

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

Tansi began to tell her, "Two Asante men went out into the forest one day. They were weavers by trade, and they had gone out to hunt for meat. When they got to the forest to collect their traps, they were met by Anansi, the mischievous spider. He was spinning a magnificent web. They watched him, studied him, and soon realised that a spider's web is a unique and beautiful thing, and that a spider's technique is flawless. They went home and decided to weave cloth the way Anansi weaves his web. From that, kente was born.

She loved days like this one, where she could speak Fante as fast as she wanted.No one telling her to slow down,no one telling her to speak English.

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

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

Now, hearing Tansi speak, Afua resumed her crying, but it was as though no one heard. These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud. At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into the Atlantic.

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.

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.

until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night. Effia's father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss

But the girl shook her head, clucked her tongue in distaste. 'If I marry him, my children will be ugly,' she declared.

That night, lying next to Edward in his room, Yaw listened as his best friend told him that he had explained to the girl that you could not inherit a scar.

Now, nearing his fiftieth birthday, Yaw no longer knew if he believed this was true.

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.

But for the rest of her life Esi would see a smile
on a white face and remember the one the soldier gave her before taking her
to his quarters, how white men smiling just meant more evil was coming with
the next wave.

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?

heat radiating off of his skin, coming

Everything was brilliant here, even the ground. Everywhere

Aunty, they say that you make impossible things possible."

She laughed again. "Eh, but they say that about Anansi, about Nyame, about the white man. I can only make the possible attainable. Do you see the difference?

Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.

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

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

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

My job is not to regulate your response to the truth - my job is to tell it.

White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, they house. They get to choose to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn't never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids.

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.

His free papers named him Kojo Freeman. Free man. Half the ex-slaves in Baltimore had the name. Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth.

If God was why, then Asamoah was yes and yes again.