Yaa Gyasi

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Her trick is to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what does a king matter? Really, she…

— Yaa Gyasi

“How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Yaw wasn't certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white…

— Yaa Gyasi

“I’m too old to go to America now. Too old for revolution, too. Besides, if we go to the white man for…

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

“Aunty, they say that you make impossible things possible.” She laughed again. “Eh, but they say that about Anansi, about Nyame, about…

— Yaa Gyasi

“And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Loneliness, maybe. Or aloneness. The way I don’t fit here or there.”

— Yaa Gyasi

“if we go to the white man for school, we will just learn the way the white man wants us to learn.…

— Yaa Gyasi

“On the first day of the second term, Yaw watched the new students amble in. They were always well-behaved children, these boys,…

— Yaa Gyasi

“I am proud to be Asante, as I am sure you are proud to be Fante, but after I lost my brothers,…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Maybe he wouldn't end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he'd be a new…

— Yaa Gyasi

“It was where all the dirty, ugly, righteous, and beautiful things were.”

— Yaa Gyasi

“People think they are coming to me for advice,” Mampanyin said, “but really, they come to me for permission. If you want…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Some people cannot afford to believe that this country isn’t that bad, that as Hillary Clinton said, “America is great because America…

— Yaa Gyasi

“There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing, you felt clarity, you felt certainty,…

— Yaa Gyasi

“it seems to me that this itself was the disaster I foresaw, a common enough disaster for most infants these days: that…

— Yaa Gyasi

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

— Yaa Gyasi

“When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast…

— Yaa Gyasi

“Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the…

— Yaa Gyasi

“he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing…

— Yaa Gyasi

“So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this…

— Yaa Gyasi

“It was enough to stir in him all of the hope and love and faith that he would ever possess, all coming…

— Yaa Gyasi