Hannah Pittard > Quotes

“We packed our trunks and suitcases, prepared for our natural and necessary moves away from home. Outwardly, we breathed sighs of relief at the somber comfort of growing up. Inwardly, we held our breath and tried to stand as still as possible, afraid we might be the only ones who didn’t yet feel the promised call of adulthood.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“We were growing up. It was one of those moments when you could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world. Perspective suddenly existed where it hadn't existed before. This was just the beginning of our lives—our lives, things that we were responsible for, things that we could control. It seemed all at once too big and too simple an idea.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we'd already lost Minka Dinnerman, as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who'd left us behind.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“And I do get it; some decisions are irreversible. But like I've said, sometimes it's the irreversible ones that help a person get to know herself a little better. It's the consequences that matter. It's the fact that there are no do-overs that makes life matter at all.”
― Hannah Pittard, Reunion

“This is where I want to be. For the first time, this is exactly where I want to be.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“Words like lucky and advantages we knew, even at our young age, were upscale euphemisms for not poor, not the son of a drunk and, later, not the son of a suicidal mother.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“A great deal of tenderness, but it was the tenderness of a hospice nurse - of one committed to caring but too familiar with pain and parting to every truly or fully invest.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“Fact: the longer I live, the less I understand.”
― Hannah Pittard, Reunion

“Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“Anybody could love anyone. That's what they don't tell you. All you have to do is make yourself.”
― Hannah Pittard

“We were creeps, jerks, idiots. We were boys; we couldn't help ourselves.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“I don't even exist. How can something that doesn't exist get in trouble? It's been the story of my life. One day here. One day there.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“None of us was stupid. We were just dreamers.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“Whenever Michael and Jeremy talked about the meetings they attended, Piedmont would wonder about his own responsibility with regard to the Negro Cause. He wondered if it was okay to sit back, keep his head down, and wait for whatever improvements those around him might acquire on his behalf. He wondered if he even believed a better future was possible.”
― Hannah Pittard, Visible Empire

“We were boys, after all, which means we were creeps-our mothers' word-which means we were indiscreet and couldn't help ourselves when it came to trading what we'd done or not done or when and with whom and how... God, we were creeps! But children also, which is what makes it excusable-excusable but perhaps for this reason also frightening, disconcerting that there wasn't someone there saying no, stop, don't do that. At least don't do that yet. But there wasn't.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“It was twenty doctors, nine architects, thirteen lawyers, and too many mothers and fathers to count. In short, it felt like everyone because to the mayor's wife, it was everyone, it was everyone she cared about, and they were all gone in a single, heartbreaking, unbelievable whop.”
― Hannah Pittard, Visible Empire

“Instead, there is the bald man, and there is his daughter, who is getting too old too fast, even as she isn’t getting old fast enough.
Here is a scene: it is morning, and he is driving away from me in the dark, and she is somewhere already awake, brushing her teeth, doing her funny forward lunges, feeling nervous for the bouts to come. And I am here, in the in-between, in a bed on the second floor of a home in Kentucky. I am in the lost hour, the skipped hour. I am alone, without a child, and it’s all happening too quickly, and it couldn’t be over too soon.”
― Hannah Pittard, If You Love It, Let It Kill You

“To imagine her with someone like us, but not us, that would be too much.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“And, suddenly, something new is now certain, something that we hadn't ever thought of before. There will come a day when we will think of Nora Lindell for the last time...Whatever the memory, we will think of her, wonder what might have been, and we won't even know it while it's happening, but it will be the last time we ever think of her. That day will come. It is a certainty now.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“We're sick of this shit," said Michael. "News people, the mayor and his wife, television shows, the goddamn president of the United States - they're all going on and on about this airplane that went down in Paris, France, on Plant Earth. They jabber on and on about the movers and the shakers, about all the important folks we lost that day. The Reverend himself comes on the radio and tells us that we better behave, that we should hang our heads in sadness at our loss. You know what, though? It isn't our loss. You understand? It isn't our loss at all. It's their loss. We have losses. Every day. Every single day we suffer losses. But no one talks about those. We get no letters of sympathy. We get nothing. Just ignored.”
― Hannah Pittard, Visible Empire

“Or maybe both stories were true, in the same way a person could be telling one story that he wanted heard and another story he didn't mean to be heard. Both were true - the audible one and the quiet one. just sometimes when you listened, you could hear them both and sometimes you couldn't.”
― Hannah Pittard, Visible Empire

“She regretted skin. Yes, skin. That was it. More than anything she regretted the existence of skin-hers or anyone else's.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way

“It's the stuff of fantasies, not of real life. In fantasies, you can get into strangers' cars. You can have sex with men you don't know. They'll love you and pet you and whisper things that high school boys don't know to whisper. They'll fall hard for you and do anything you tell them to, including take you home whenever you want.”
― Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way