Brit Bennett Quotes

Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

She hadn't realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

This big ol' world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.

There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.

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

A town always looked different once you'd returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn't mistake it for a stranger's house but you'd keeping banging your shins on the table corners.

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.

When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.

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

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

A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.

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.

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.

Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time.

Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.

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.

The key to staying lost was to never love anything.

Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.

How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

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

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.

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

You didn't just find a self out there waiting. You had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.

That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.

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.

She'd already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference.

You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.

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.

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

She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

They're gonna hate me anyway," Loretta said. "Might as well hate me in my big house with all of my nice things.

She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.

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

Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it.

Soft things can take a beating. But you push somethin’ hard a little bit and it shatters. You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don’t last.

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

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.

Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what assassination meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point. Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.

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.

This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied.

The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

Well, maybe that's your problem," Kennedy said, "You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.

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

Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

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

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.

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

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

TV loves a black woman judge,” Pam told her. “It’s funny—can you imagine what this world would look like if we decided what’s fair?

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

You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it.

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.

If you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

You shouldn’t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it. And I think you want to know now.

I love shopping,' she said, almost to herself. 'It's like trying on all the other people you could be.

You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.

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.

In all of her school pictures, she'd either looked too black or over-exposed, invisible except for the whites of her eyes and teeth. The camera, Reese told her once, worked like the human eye. Meaning, it was not created to notice her.

She couldn’t imagine living like this—hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone.

Deserve is a bullshit term,” her yoga instructor boyfriend said. “None of us deserves anything. We get what we get.

Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.

Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.

Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of gifts she hadn’t deserved.

Bones, like anything else, strong until they weren't.

She always felt nervous around strange men, even though she’d known the man who’d hurt her. If a man who knew you could hurt you, who knew what a man who didn’t might do?

what was the point of sharing good news with someone who couldn’t be happy for you?

Would they ever spend time like that together again? Could you be nostalgic for a friendship that wasn’t over yet or did the fact that you were nostalgic mean that it already was?

Negroes always love our hometowns,” he said. “Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.

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

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

Do you think—” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?” “I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said. “Do you think he loved me?” Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.

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.

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.

The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.

We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. 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. —

It wasn't hard to move into someone else' life if you did it a little at a time.

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.

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?

Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.

Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.

We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return.

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.

She had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time, her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be? Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it. She had just made the rational decision.

People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable. Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died. She was fascinated by the mystery of dissections as well as the challenge. They had to search for tiny nerves that were impossible to find. It was almost like a little treasure hunt.

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.

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?