Jennine Capó Crucet > Quotes

“Losing privilege can feel a lot like inequality. If something feels unfair to you as a white person, it's likely that equality is actually being achieved in that moment.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“There is nothing like the whites of someone’s eyes to convince you how very true what you believe is, how very much you must act on it.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, Make Your Home Among Strangers

“I've come to see the American Dream for what it really is: a lie my parents had little choice but to buy into and sell to me, a lie that conflated working hard with passing for, becoming, and being white.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“But I also instantly recognized this response as my conditioning from grad school, where these things were trained out of me, where I was reprogrammed in a way that actually took away my power while purporting to give me access to power--power that, through my voice, I'd already had.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, AOC: The Fearless Rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and What It Means for America

“You squint your eyes at the empty places between the frames, the spots we've taught each other to ignore.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, How to Leave Hialeah

“A stack of banged-up grocery carts humped each other in a metal orgy in the far corner of the new Sedano’s parking lot.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, Make Your Home Among Strangers

“(Can a whale and a man fall in love? Of course! There's a whole other book about exactly that-- a crazy, obsessive kind of love, more or less-- another big book Izzy's never read, but why would he? It's super long and besides, he was never that book's intended audience. That book might have a lot going for it to some, but it never imagined a guy like Izzy reading it. The proof: look at that title. Like Izzy would ever in this lifetime risk walking down a Miami high school hallway holding some fat book about dick.)”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“The wedding planner reminds you often that you can plan it all you want, but you can't control other people, especially when they have plans of their own.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“I was surprising everyone, even myself: I was home for a holiday we didn’t really celebrate. Eating turkey on a Thursday seemed mostly arbitrary to my Cuban-born-and-raised parents, and so to my sister and me growing up. Still, my entire school career up to that point celebrated America and its founding—the proof: a half-dozen handprint turkeys stuffed under my mother’s mattress,”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, Make Your Home Among Strangers

“You could say she's left anyone watching to wonder - even marvel - at all that she could be, if given the space. Or better still: if the tank didn't exist to begin with.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“What I still find remarkable is that a decision I made at seventeen, with very little information or guidance, has gone on to shape my entire life. Maybe this feels remarkable to me because it’s a lasting characteristic of the first-ten college student identity, which can carry with it the knowledge of a shadow life, one where you’re equally happy having done something or gone somewhere else. Or maybe the decision still feels astonishing to me because I initially chose to attend a completely different u university, its two biggest draws being that it was essentially free and that my best friend would be there—two reasons that seemed good to me and to my family, in part because none of us knew what we could or should expect from the college experience. Perhaps what needs the most consideration when college commitments are being made is not which college, but what you feel you need fro a school, and that’s a tricky set of qualities to recognize (and an even trickier thing to trust) when you’re the first in your family to set off down that path.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“She cannot imagine subjecting a new life to the life she's endured - is still enduring. And because she cannot imagine this, she knows herself capable of maternal love - the love of wanting better for your own, of protecting your own from what you were made to endure.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“I read her the topics slowly, pausing after each sentence, waiting for her to say something, just an mmhmm or the conversational throw-me-a-bone of okay. The first topic was two paragraphs long. I remember it had the word ivtersectionalities in it. And the word gendered. I waited for her response and for the ways it would encourage me, tor her to tell me I could do this, but I knew from my mother’s total silence that, like me, she’d never before heard these words: my first insight into how accessible to certain vocabularies was a kind of privilege.

Of course, I didn’t know to call this privilege, not yet. “You’re right,” my mother said after a moment. “You’re screwed.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“I want to believe I've made my peace with the immense failure that my kind of success rests upon.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“The wall is full of photos only from the wedding, as if nothing else in their lives had ever happened to them.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“What a waste of all that metal, that pain, and that work. With that gift came the commitment to honor and maintain it, and perhaps because I was the first in my family to have such a gift, I didn’t know that things never stop shifting, that getting the chance at something better doesn’t automatically guarantee it.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“What's more entertaining: pushing a beach ball around a tank, or training someone to repeatedly climb over bleacher steps to fetch said ball and bring it back?”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“A staff member spent their afternoon covering the bathroom's floor in a foot of straw as if that would keep the delicate yet mighty flamingo from absolutely losing its shit, when what really kept each of them calm were the mirrors: as storms hit, they gazed at themselves for hours on end, huddling up against the sinks en masse, vying to get closer to the glass, like chongas in a club's bathroom wrestling for the vantage point form which they could best reapply their lip liner.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“- The point is, the universe sent her that dog to give her something to distract her. The universe wanted her to have him. Does it really matter how it happened if the end is the same?
- Danny is looking right at him again. He thinks the answer is yes, it matters. It matters how what we might love is lost or found. How could it not matter? It's the difference between a blessing and a curse. If it didn't matter what happened, if it didn't matter which version of events was true, then what is Izzy even doing there? Not just on this boat, but here in this city, in this country instead of the one where he was born?”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“A promise is not the same as a guarantee, but we couldn’t tell the difference yet.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“It's the orca who've adapted to compensate for the inability of the trainers.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“... and the girl is so desperate for his attention that her face is basically doing an impression of a pit bull on death row at a shelter trying to get herself adopted.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“The first one, the one not named Rudy, works at Pembroke Lakes Mall all the way up in Broward, at the T-Mobile stand right near the food court. It would be a better sign if he worked for Verizon or AT&T, but whatever, dude's got to start somewhere, right? Irregardless of any cease and desist letter, you can't just start off as Mr. Worldwide, not without first spending some time as Mr. 305.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend

“Though the bus was anything but quiet, what with the other chaperones refusing to do their jobs in favor of ingratiating themselves to their child's friends.”
― Jennine Capó Crucet, Say Hello to My Little Friend