76 Quotes by Brit Bennett

Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.

She and Nadia lived on a forever tilting floor between love and envy, and she finally felt that floor tilt until she could stand.

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.

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?

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

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.

Leave him,” her friend Roberta told her over the phone. “You stay, he thinks he can get away with it.”“It ain’t that simple,” Desiree said. She glanced toward her baby’s room, touching her swollen lip. She suddenly imagined Stella’s face, her own but unbruised.“Why?” Roberta said. “You love him? And he loves you so much, he knocked your head off your shoulders?”“It wasn’t that bad,” she said.“And you aim to stick around until it is?

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

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