60 Quotes by Yaa Gyasi

My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core.

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.

He runs his hands along her scabby back, and she does the same along his, and as they work together, clutching each other, some scars reopen. They are both bleeding now, both bride and bridegroom, in this unholy holy union.

Some people make it out of their stories unscathed; thriving. Some people don't.

As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.

It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I'd once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I'd made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.

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

There is no living thing on God's green earth that doesn't come to know pain sometime.

She has spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is.