Angela Flournoy > Quotes

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Here is the truth about self-discovery: it is never without cost.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The words settled on her shoulders like a curse, and one thing was clear: there was no one to save her but her.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by an ruin her.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Everybody else cain't be wrong all the time. Sometimes it's gotta be you.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“There ain't no haints in Detroit.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Where do the homeless make toast?”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“You're worried about her forgiving you...but you need to be worrying about why you're acting up in the first place.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The same quality that read as dependable and even-keeled in his youth had crusted over and become stubborn and pitiable.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“That was how he existed in their lives: suddenly there, on his own time,”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“It was frustrating, the way this siblings worshipped their parents. What part of their worlds would crumble if they took a good look at their parents' flaws? If there was no trauma, why not talk about the everyday, human elements of their upbringing? Call a spade a spade.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“There was a difference between violent, destructive crimes and bending rules that were prejudiced or predatory to start.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“She wanted to say something about how when you have a child it changes the way you feel when you’re alone, how you are never alone in the same way again because there is a live, independently thinking part of you out in the world that you can never fully push out of your awareness, even if you try.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“She was here and already in the future looking back at here. Editing, perfecting, reliving it.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Insomnia was its own kind of haunting.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“You got a child to feed and a life to get on with.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“I don't just sit around hopin for nothing. I do shit. It's the 'hope' part that fucks that line all up. You should change it to somethin like, 'We fight for better things,' or 'We work for better things.' Or 'We plan for better things.' That's what's wrong with this city; it ain't about the mayor. Too many people busy hoping shit will get better to actually figure out a way to make shit better.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of "Ask and you shall receive." This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha's prayers were a series of thank-yous and I'm sorrys.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Says you and your family. Sooner or later you’re gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn’t mean it is. Not at all.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least. “I’m”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“but Cha-Cha thought the word was too clinical to truly convey the sort of secret, sad drinker Francis was. He took no joy in his drinking. It was as if he drank to punish himself for some misdeed.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“nipping at society’s collective heels. Atrocities, natural catastrophes, the dissolution of common decency. Always something new to hate, someone who deserved derision and ostracism. Always somebody murdered, somebody murdered, somebody murdered. Their gone-too-soon faces everywhere, overly familiar. No way to live at all.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“There is no over the hill,
just a series of small hillocks, plotted out before me,
each one I pray
not to die climbing.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“He look like the type to bring a list with him into the bedroom, and he ain’t done makin love till he check off everything he got in his mind to do.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Guilt gripped her--she was the person who determined Reina's salary, which in turn determined these conditions. But she remembered that Reina sent the bulk of her money back home to her parents. She would be able to afford a better place otherwise, surely. It was a kind of sacrifice that Nakia never had cause to make. She hoped she would be willing if circumstances called for it. Why was life so hard for some people? A question people called you stupid for asking, yet no one could give you a straightforward explanation.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“as if being a single mom meant she was some solitary mule humping an unbearable burden.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“In the final years of his life, Francis spent most days on the back porch, eyeing his tomato patch with good-natured suspicion, listening to his teams lose on the radio, and smoking his pipe. He did these things, and he held Brianne. Right against his chest. Francis had nothing cute or remotely entertaining to offer babies; he didn’t say anything to them at all. Instead he gave them his heartbeat. Put their little heads on his chest and went about his day. Even the fussiest babies seemed to know better than to cut short their time with Francis via undue crying or excessive pooping.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House