60 Quotes by Yaa Gyasi

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.

The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn't segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.

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.

But Jo wasn't angry. Not anymore. He couldn't really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.

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?

The older Jo got, the more he understood about the woman called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.

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

Whenever I think of my mother, I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room.