Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes

“When your body takes up more room than your voice you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my knuckles talk for me. Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults.”

“I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn’t that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.”

“I think about all the things we could be if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.”

“I touch my tongue to the word volition, like it’s a fruit I’ve never tasted that’s already gone sour in my mouth.”

“So many of the poems tonight felt a little like our own stories. Like we saw and were seen. And how crazy would it be if I did that for someone else?”

“How does a girl like me figure out the weight of what it means to love a boy?”

“Sometimes it seems like writing is the only way I keep from hurting.”

“It is ungrateful to feel like a burden. It is ungrateful to resent my own birth. I know that Twin and I are miracles.”

“And about this apple, how come God didn’t explain why they couldn’t eat it? He gave Eve curiosity but didn’t expect her to use it? Unless the apple is a metaphor?”

“What’s the point of God giving me life if I can’t live it as my own?”

“I sit wondering how writing can bring such strange strangers into the same room.”

″...maybe this is why Papi stopped listening to music, because it can make your body want to rebel. To speak up. And even that young I learned music can become a bridge between you and a total stranger.”

“There have been many days when Papi’s check comes late and we have to count how many eggs we have left or how long the meat will stretch. I don’t want Tía and me to always live this way. I will make it. I will make it. I will make it easier for us both.”

″‘Don’t let it stain you,’ Tia’s always said. But can’t she see? This place we’re from already has it’s prints on me.”

“It is easy in a moment like this to want to speak over this woman, to tell Tia there is nothing more we can do, to say out loud the woman is lucky that her lungs still draw breath. But I learned young, you do not speak of the dying as if they are already dead.”

“I know too much of mud.”

“I want to take what I’ve learned from Tia’s life dedicated to aid & build a life where I can help others.”

“I am beginning to learn that life-altering news is often like a premature birth: ill-timed, catching someone unaware, emotionally unprepared & often where they shouldn’t be.”

“He must have realized his laugh was like one of those paper shredders making a sad confetti of my hopes.”

“They say the plane fell right out of the sky.”