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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“This big ol' world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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, The Mothers

“The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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, The Mothers

“You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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, The Mothers

“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, The Mothers

“Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“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, The Mothers

“Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The key to staying lost was to never love anything.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“You didn't just find a self out there waiting. You had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“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, The Mothers

“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, The Mothers

“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.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half