Brit Bennett Quotes

niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.

Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.

Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't.

All of her blessings had come so easily in the beginning of her life, and she'd spent the back half losing them all.

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. -

No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him. Yes,

She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway - dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in.

She may hear this story, someday, and wonder what it has to do with her. A girl hiding her scared in her prettiness, an unwanted baby, a dead mother. These are not her heartbreaks. Every heart is fractured differently and she knows the pattern of her cracks, she traces them like lines across her palm. She has a living mother and besides, she was always wanted. Prayed for, even. Now she's grown, or at least she thinks she is. But she hasn't yet learned from the mathematics of grief. The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. She's heard her granddaddy preach about the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind in search of the one lost sheep.
But what about the flock he abandons? she wonders. Aren't they lost now too?

You used to be able to spot an ain't-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain't-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas' basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who's willing and if she gets in trouble - well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next.

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain't shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It's exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.

Yes, those are the ones we worry about.

You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don't last.

She licked cinnamon sugar off her fingers, sun-heavy and happy, the type of happiness that before might have felt ordinary, but now seemed fragile, like if she stood too quickly, it might slide off her shoulders and break.

Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight.

In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full. "I'm

Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

but it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it. Her

A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about? -

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way.

She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again.

You wouldn't want a son?"

"Too dangerous," he said. "Black boys are target practice. At least black girls got a chance."

"I don't think that's true." "What's not true? Why you think I enlisted? My pops told me, you better learn to shoot before these white men shoot you, and I did. I been all the way to Iraq and I could walk down the street here and get my head blown off. You don't know what that's like.

If a man who knew you could hurt you, who knew what a man who didn't might do? "I'm

These were the moments when adulthood was formed, not a birthday but the realization that she was now the one pouring a handful of candy into children's bags, that she was now the one expected to give, not receive.

In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.

Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother's hand was gone and she'd fallen, clattering to the floor.

sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.

The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them.

She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.

We tried to love the world. We cleaned after this world, scrubbed its hospital floors and ironed its shirts, sweated in its kitchens and spooned school lunches, cared for its sick and nursed its babies. But the world didn't want us, so we left and gave our love to Upper Room. Now we're afraid of this world. A boy snatched Hattie's purse one night and now none of us go out after dark. We hardly go anywhere at all, besides Upper Room. We've seen what this world has to offer. We're scared of what it wants.

At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints. She would always feel trapped behind that window, between her and the rest of the world, but at least in Ann Arbor, the glass was clearer. Whenever

If nakedness would not reveal who you were, then what would?

She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted.

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn't hide.

She never felt darker than when she was running, and at the same time, she never felt less black, less anything.

It was strange learning the contours of another's loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

Being white wasn't the most exciting part. Being anyone else was the thrill. To transform into a different person in plain sight, nobody around her even able to tell. She'd never felt so free.

Your guilt can't do nothin for me, honey. You want to go feel good about feelin bad, you can go on and do it right across the street.

But maybe in those seven minutes they'd first been apart, they'd each lived a lifetime, setting out their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be.

she imagined her life caught between his teeth, her trusting him not to bite. Two

After a secret's been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

But the passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who'd passed over undetected, the same way you'd never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse.

Later that night, when we left the prayer room, we felt something in Upper Room shift. Couldn't explain it, something just felt different. We knew the walls of Upper Room like the walls of our own homes. We'd soft-stepped down hallways as the choir practiced, noticing that corner in front of the instrument closet where the paint had chipped, or the tile in the ladies' room that had been laid crooked. We'd spend decades studying the splotch that looked like an elephant's ear on the ceiling above the water fountain. And we knew the exact spot on the sanctuary carpet where Elise Turner had knelt the night before she killed herself. (The more spiritual of us even swore they could still see the indented curve from her knees.) Sometimes we joked that when we died, we'd all become part of these walls, pressed down flat like wallpaper.

She was not a mother but she had a mother's gift of rushing to the worst possible outcome.

Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see.

Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman's life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne.

years later, she wondered if that was the point, if sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying. The

He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn't exist.

A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We'll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle. We

Nadia had invented versions of her mother's life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain. Her mother, no longer cradling a tiny, wrinkled body in a hospital bed, an exhausted smile on her face, but seventeen and scared, sitting inside an abortion clinic, waiting for her name to be called. Her mother, no longer her mother, graduating from high school, from college, from graduate school even. Her mother listening to lectures or delivering her own, stationed behind a podium, running a toe up the back of her calf. Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother's life began.

She sacrificed for a daughter who could never learn what she'd lost.

Two years of school, which discouraged him, but Aubrey said the time would pass anyway-why not spend it chasing after something he wanted?

Sometimes she wondered if she only loved him when it was cold, in the middle of winter when everything was dead. -

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain't-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain't about shit.