Cinelle Barnes > Quotes

“It can’t be a joyride without a few bumps. No, it wouldn’t be a joyride at all.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“one rich girl’s trash is a poor girl’s dinner.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Wherever we’re headed, this is what we take with us, I thought. Love in the memories. And many, many ghosts.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Downstairs was where I learned how to braid hair, how to skip rope, and how to eat balut—a common Southeast Asian street food: a developing duck embryo boiled alive in its shell.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“I feel gratitude for the sense of permanence here, but sometimes the permanence gives me—I don’t know what else to call it—a fright.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“incubus and succubus rolling around and lurching, tripping over their miseries.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Maybe I am finally the enigma she can’t decode. Maybe I like to be a mystery. What child of trauma doesn’t?”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“I did not have wings, so I made myself shrink.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“She talked with an energetic voice, pitchy and onomatopoeic, but with her hands folded on her lap. That’s how I would always remember her: body constrained but dying to talk.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Promise me, you’ll always remember, none of this is normal. But we were not made for normal, and for that, I am sorry, my warrior girl,” Papa said. “Be brave, be smart, be kind, and have faith. Remember that you are made of light.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“God was now speaking to me, telling me to keep the faith and promising me an escape. He spoke not through scripture nor through the retelling of parables by a priest, but through angsty, tormented Holden Caulfield, and all the other voices in the books I had read. At the turn of every page I breathed in, felt my heart tighten and release, and said, as the nuns next door repeatedly sang, “Amen.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Her parents came from a Philippine province called Bicol,”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“At breakfast, Mama didn’t talk about other people—not her aerobics friends, her cocktail party friends, her doctor friends, nor her sisters. Instead she talked about my hair, how pretty it was when it was up in a bun, and how it accentuated my jaw and forehead, the very facial features I got from her. She also talked about my cheekbones—which I got from Papa—how they were high but friendly, and how on them a kind smile could hang.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“They took me to the nearest hospital, Santo Niño, where the lower class received medical care.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Acting as family historian, I know now, is really just telling myself the story I already knew. I wait not on anybody else's affirmation, just my own. And here, in expecting only my own validation, is where my freedom lies.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Mama decided against vaccines, appalled by the thought of seeing her already-unpretty baby lanced in her fatless thighs.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“The pozo was a playground of a special sort, a mix between a water park for the young and a water source for the poor.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Words, images—where we three live. Home is, even here and even now, in the imagination.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“Elma turned back around to my direction and opened the main doors. In the shaft of moonlight coming through, she embraced me one last time while weeping and said, “Your books and pictures will remind you of everything: heartaches, lessons, joys. Find the ocean. Write.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“My dire circumstances taught me to drink deep—to live a life of life: crying from the marrow, laughing from the gut, working with every muscle, acting and reacting with ten fingers, ten toes, five senses, and a sixth one . . . the heart.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Maybe I amass these stories—about heroes and antiheroes—to tally how many times I am better and they are worse.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

“The monsoon gave me my first experience of candlelit living, of darkness being larger than our upper-class life.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“The master bedroom took up the far corner of the main floor. It was the biggest bedroom in the house, and the only one with a walk-in closet, double vanity, his-and-her toilets, a bidet, a Jacuzzi, a built-in cosmetics organizer, two balconies, and its own well and garden.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“In the center of the house stood the disco, a rectangular marble space accessed from adjacent rooms through arched entryways.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“they combed our hair while we watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One hundred brushstrokes a night, Mama ordered, no more or no less.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“And to her, love was as big as the rocks on her ring and earrings, as wide as the garden that accommodated her guests, and as deep as the blue blood that ran in her veins.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“We stood in front of that hill as if it were an altar, a consecrated knoll displaying the colonizer’s gifts to the bloodline: Christianity, education, and rank.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“There are seven M’s to building a dynasty,” Mr. Santiago said. “Money, machine, media, marriage, murder, myth, and mergers.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“The more he tried to save our empire, the more he sank into the middle-aged man’s abyss: failure, regret, and shame.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

“Books did not discriminate, at least not explicitly.”
― Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom