Quotes by Yaa Gyasi

We someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

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.

A little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldnt name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness. Beulah ran in her sleep, ran like shed stolen something, when really she had done nothing other than expect the peace, the clarity, that came with dreaming. Yes, Jo thought, this was where it started, but when, where, did it end?

But 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.

The white mans god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and tat thing was really good?

History is Storytelling.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.

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

Maybe he wouldnt end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe hed be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.

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.

We are all weak most of the time, she said finally. 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. She smiled at him. But 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.

Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.

We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore. This is.

... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.

he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.

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

“The thing is we dont need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us. Live long enough and youll forget almost everything you thought youd always remember.”

“When I watched the limping mouse refuse the lever, I was reminded yet again of what it means to be reborn, made new, saved, which is just another way of saying of needing those outstretched hands of your fellows and the grace of God. That saving grace, amazing grace , is a hand and a touch, a fiber- optic implant and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet, how sweet it is.”

“Mrs. Pasternack said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, The truth is we dont know what we dont know. We dont even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallways, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. Thats science, but thats also everything else, isnt it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

“When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever-press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. What would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because Im aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”