Leila Mottley > Quotes

“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“The idea of drowning doesn’t bother me, though, since we’re made of water anyway. It’s kind of like your body overflowing with itself.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We’re always trying to own men we don’t got no control of.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Here’s the thing about killer whales: contrary to popular belief, they won’t kill you and they’re not even whales. That’s what happens to someone when the world decides something about you, grabs hold and morphs you into an illusion of yourself: suddenly even your name isn’t your own.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“am still waiting to be hit by some universe-halting love that will turn me inside out and remove all the rotting parts of me.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We always showing people our hands like it's proof we're human.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong. So if you’re asking me if I think you’d be prettier if you was skinny as a reed, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t much care if you’re skinny or pretty, and don’t you start thinking they’re the same thing, but I sure as hell am always gonna think you prettiest when you’re breathing, when you’re fed and housed and happy.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“If you’re not your mother’s only child, you know there’s not nobody in the world that can understand the dirt you fought to grow from like your brother.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was the more real?”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“That was before I learned that life won't give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don't make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.”
― Leila Mottley

“That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“He's here, sunshine probably blistering the back of his neck, staring at me, hoping for anything different than what I've always given him. He doesn't deserve fractions and that's all I got, all I'm willing to give.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We're all wanting something, though; most of us replacing what we really want with skin, which works until you wake up and the mirror is a blur of time twisting around the throat.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“You remember how much safer it is to not want nothing at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Daddy always said fuck the cops, but don’t fuck with them, unless you got a reason.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“But that was not how you loved a child. That was how you let a child love you.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“That boy is a wonder. He's my autumn rain, my last picture of the sun before it sets. Daytime is not possible without Trevor. Not even sure the sun come out without Trevor.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I think 190 might have a moon in place of his heart: waxing and waning, trying to decide if it is whole.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I wonder if they’ll ever chant about the women too, and not just the ones murdered, but the particular brutality of a gun barrel to a head. The women with no edges laid, with matted hair and drooping eyes and no one filming to say it happened, only a mouth and some scars.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty. The café lady sticks the pen behind her ear where her undercut fades from blue to hot pink and then blond, and she smiles the same way that the mean girls used to smile before they said I couldn’t sit at their table in elementary school, like she’s waiting for a punch or some kind of prize.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun's out.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I knew what it was to be our parents’ child.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“And if you think I don’t make sense with all of them just ’cause I’m white, you wouldn’t believe what happens when a girl these days gets knocked up. Suddenly, it’s the most important thing about you. Suddenly, you don’t have green eyes or a two-bedroom shack on Willow Street or straight A’s in Biology. You are nothing but a young mother.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“She tears her eyes away from the road for a moment to glance at me. “If you did something wrong, then so did Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem and every other woman who did what she had to do even when it wasn’t respected.” She coughs. “I’m”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Said this wasn’t no town where you could just be out here mixing with the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people. Funny, I thought. It was the only time in my life I’d ever heard Pawpaw talk about us like we were the right kind of people.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big