Yaa Gyasi Quotes

“Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

“You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. 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.”

“Tonight, you must be like an animal when he comes into the room. 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 trick is to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what does a king matter? Really, she is king and queen and everything in between.”

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

“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...”

″...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.”

“Whose story do we believe, then...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?”

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

“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?”