Brit Quotes

Brit: What's your major? Alex: Chemistry. And yours? Brit: Chemistry. Kiss me so we can see if we still have it. 'Cause you own my heart, my soul, and everything else in between.

Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.

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.

There will be no more British guys. Unless they are members of the royal family, of course.

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.

Whoa," Brit breathed, handing my drink back to me. "That was..." "Really hot," Jacob finished. "I thought you two were going to rip off each other's clothes and start making babies right here on the dirty, beer covered floor. Like I was going to have to start charging admission for what was about to go down.

We also told her you weren't a serial killer," Brit interjected. Cam nodded. "That's a glowing recommendation. Hey, at least he's not a serial killer. I'm going to put that on my Facebook profile.

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.

I beg your pardon?" Robson says. One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.

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.

Just living isn't enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower." -Hans Christian Anderson

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.

The only thing separating Americans and Brits is a comman language.

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.

What are you up to?” “Oh, you know, mischief and mayhem,” he replied. “That so reminds me of Harry Potter,” Brit said, sighing. “I need a re-read.” We all turned to her. Two bright spots appeared in her cheeks as she tossed her blonde hair back. “What? I’m not ashamed to admit that random things remind me of Harry Potter.

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.

As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.

Well he should get over himself. He tried to get me burned at the stake in Brit History yesterday. Here I am minding my own business like a good little girl, and out of the blue Tucker raises his hand and accuses me of being a witch" "sounds like something Tucker would do" admits wendy. "Everybody had to vote on it. I barely escaped with my nuns life. Obviously I'll have to return the favour.

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.

Me sonríe lentamente con una sonrisa que probablemente haya inventado para derretir los corazones de todas las chicas del planeta -Brit

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

He's not the relationship kind or so I hear." "And do you want a relationship?" I asked her. "No." She laughed, dabbing her fry. "But I have a feeling with someone like him, you get one taste and you will always want more." "Sort of like crack?" Jacob suggested. "Or Cheetos," Brit supplied.

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.

El deseo por abalanzarme sobre sus brazos y sentir su calor rodeándome es tan poderoso que me pregunto si es médicamente posible sentir una adicción semejante por Otro ser humano. -Brit

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

For Brits, class was like humility: you only had it as long as you denied it.

What’s your name, lad?” “Newton. Newton Pulsifer.” “LUCIFER? What’s that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters?” “That’s Pulsifer,” explained Newton. “With a P. I don’t know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey.” The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.

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,

You do know him, so that's a lame excuse." It was a lame excuse, but it was the best I had. "How do you really ever truly know someone?" Brit smacked her hands to her cheeks and she shook her head. "He's not a serial killer." "Speaking of serial killers, everyone thought Ted Bundy was a really charming, handsome man. And look how he turned out. Psycho." Jacob stared at me. "He's not Ted Bundy.

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.

Henry Denton: You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you? Elsie: We do if something's funny, sir.

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.

Do you ever think of moving back?" "To Coldwater? Heck, no. England suits me fine. These Brits love my accent. The first time Gavin asked me out it was just to hear me talk. Lucky for him, it's one of the things I do best." All teasing left her eyes. "Too many memories back home. Can't drive down the street without thinking I see Scott in the crowd.

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.

Americans will smile at you and be extremely friendly but if your name is not Cory or Chad, they make no effort at saying it properly. The Brits will be surly and will be suspicious if you’re too friendly but they will treat foreign names as though they are actually valid names.” “That’s interesting,

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.

So I'm over there in England, you know, trying to get news about the [L.A.] riots... and all these Brit people are trying to sympathize with me... 'Oh Bill, crime is horrible. Bill, if it's any consolation crime is horrible here, too.' ...Shutup. This is Hobbitown and I am Bilbo Hicks, Okay? This is a land of fairies and elves. You do not have crime like we have crime, but I appreciate you trying to be, you know, Diplomatic. You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article - front page of the paper - one day, in England: 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shafsbry.' Wooooo... 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become roughians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shafsbry tonight.

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.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. -Simone Weil

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.

I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.” And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

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.

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.

Speaking of that - bitch, this is my country. I was born and raised in England. Great Britain colonised my family's homeland, and then that led my people to have the right to come to the UK to settle and have kids in that country. If the Brits could come to South Asia (and many, many other lands) to claim it as their own, then by gosh, I have the right to call England my home, and I will not get out because I'm told to... and neither will the rest of my people.

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.

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

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.

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.

… I agree with two things: the steppe is wide—even though I’ve never been there, and the mountains, fuck, yes, the mountains are a thing for themselves. They eat you up, swallow you whole, digest and churn around until their loneliness spits you back out again and you think that nothing else matters. Just them, and that tiny handful of life that’s your own. Fucking insignificant. Nothing, no one, barely remembered, except perhaps for a moment of recognition in a goddamned teahouse.” He shut up, suddenly, had said too much. Vadim flashed a smile. “You’re my favourite enemy, too. Fucking messy Brit.

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. —

If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you saw one of them coming, you could cross to the other side of the street and avoid them altogether. But this is not a proper world. In our world, many bad people look quite nice, and many good people are not beautiful at all. Many good people aren't pretty or cute or even interesting-looking.

Tequila, anyone?” he asked our group, but his eyes were on me. “Hell, yeah, K, break it out,” Blake said. I tried to take a step back, but I couldn't go far. Kaidan poured the drinks, handing one to each twin and Blake. “Jay?” he asked. “Nah, dude. I gotta drive.” “Kope? Anna?” We both stared at him, not answering. “Oh, that's right, I nearly forgot,” Kaidan said with smooth indifference. “The prince and princess would never stoop so low. Well, bottoms up to us peasants.” What was up with that? The group shared a round of uneasy glances. Jay's mouth was set in firm disapproval as he stared at Kaidan, who wouldn't meet Jay's eye. The four of them raised their glasses, taking the shots and chasing them with bites of lime. I got a strong whiff of the pungent, salty tequila and gripped the counter with one hand. “How's your soda, princess?” Though Kaidan spoke with a calm air, there was underlying menace that pained me to hear. “You don't need to be so hateful,” I whispered. “If you ask me, I'd say the princess prefers a dark knight.” Ginger smirked and took a long drink of her beer. “She only thinks she does,” Kaidan said to her. I opened and closed my hands at my sides. After all we'd been through, how could he stand there and have the audacity to throw temptations in my face and insult me? I wanted to say something to shut him up, but the more flustered I got, the more tongue-tied I became. “Anna?” Jay asked. “You ready to bounce?” There was no way Jay was ready to leave. “No! Don't go yet,” Marna begged. She yanked the front of Kaidan's shirt. “You're scaring everyone off, Kai! If you can't be nice, then don't get so pissed.” “She means drunk,” Blake said to me in a stage whisper; then he added, “Brits,” with a roll of his eyes. Blake's attempt at comic relief didn't lighten the mood much. “My apologies,” Kaidan said to Marna. He slid the bottle away with the back of his hand, and Marna patted down the bit of shirt she'd crumpled. I stared at Kaidan, but he wouldn't meet my eye.

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.