Brit Bennett Quotes

#1. 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?

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#3. 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.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#5. He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe. He

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#8. 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.

Brit Bennett

#9. 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.

Brit Bennett

#10. 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

Brit Bennett

#11. 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?

Brit Bennett

#12. 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.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#15. 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.

Brit Bennett

#16. 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

Brit Bennett

#17. Maybe you didn't know who you would be in the world. Maybe you were a different person everywhere you lived. "Tell

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#19. Her left hand hanging out the window held no ring but we imagined she had a man somewhere, a man she could get rid of when she had the mind to because she would never put herself in the position to be left.

Brit Bennett

#20. 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.

Brit Bennett

#21. 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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#25. 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.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#27. 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.

Brit Bennett

#28. 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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#30. 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.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#32. She had been his first love, so maybe, in a way, she had the rightful claim to his heart. Maybe it was like how when you stepped out of the grocery store line to grab bread, no one could really be mad when you returned to your spot. It wasn't cutting if you had been there before.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett

#35. 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. She

Brit Bennett

#36. She'd thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn't find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently

Brit Bennett

#37. 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.

Brit Bennett

#38. 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

Brit Bennett

#39. 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.

Brit Bennett

#40. 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?

Brit Bennett

#41. 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,

Brit Bennett

#42. 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.

Brit Bennett

#43. 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.

Brit Bennett

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

Brit Bennett