Anna > Anna's Quotes

“That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she's miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn't want to be seen.”
― Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

“Going to one school from age five to age eighteen was like being buried in amber. It wasn't even like his walls, which were covered with layers of things - you had to be the same person from start to finish, with no big cognitive jumps.”
― Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

“Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.”
― Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

“We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“I felt the way I often felt in this country - simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn't, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn't permeated us, flowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn't leave a hole and that's the agony.”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“Maybe it’s the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“You don’t understand,” my dad said. “They stop you.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” my mom asked.

“That’s why I was being cautious.”

“Who stops you?”

“The police. If you’re white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you’re not, they stop you.”

“Who told you that?”

“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or if you’re brown, they automatically think you’ve done something wrong.”

“Rafa, that’s ridiculous. We’ve lived here for fifteen years. We’re citizens.”

“The police don’t know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!”

My mom shook her head. “That’s what that was about?”

“I didn’t want to give them reason to stop me.”

“You were driving like a blind man, Rafa. That will give them reason to stop you.”

“Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!”

The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.

“Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you’ll be fine,” my mom offered.

“The way of the world,” my dad said.

“What?” my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.

“Just trying to blend in. That’s the way of the world.”

“Well, that’s the way of America, at least,” my mom said.”
― Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

“Physical nearness does not necessarily breed intimacy.”
― Cristina Henriquez, Come Together, Fall Apart

“Your body is not a temple.
Your body is the house you grew up in.
How dare you try to burn it to the ground.
You are bigger than this.
You are bigger
than this.”
― SIERRA DEMULDER

“My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest but the one who
makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart

to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling
with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.
It has always been you.


-Love, Forgive Me”
― Sierra Demulder

“Imposter syndrome” wasn’t coined as a term until the 1970s, but it’s safe to assume women have always felt it: that nagging feeling that, even after you’ve just done something great, maybe you actually don’t deserve the
praise.”
― Jessica Bennett, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace

“Remember: white men constitute just 31 percent of the American population. There is no situation in which they should be constituting the majority of the room.”
― Jessica Bennett, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace

“THE LESBIAN AVENGERS
Their motto playfully proclaimed “we recruit,” and recruit this group did. Formed in the 1990s to bring attention to lesbian causes, the Lesbian Avengers spent Valentine’s Day handing out chocolate kisses in Grand Central Station that read, “You’ve just been kissed by a lesbian.” In Bryant Park, they unveiled a papier-mâché sculpture of Alice B. Toklas embracing her lover, Gertrude Stein. The Avengers also ate fire, which would become their dramatic trademark—first practiced as an homage to an Oregon gay man and lesbian woman who were burned to death after a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the apartment they shared.”
― Jessica Bennett, Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace

“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do[.]”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as “banks,” and every fairy tale is worth a fortune.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“There’s something special about a grandmother’s house. You never forget how it smells.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Remember, the center of a woman is her uterus. Her crazy, crazy uterus.”
― Therese Oneill, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

“Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“This is because white people need to show off the books that they have read. Just as hunters will mount the heads of their kills, white people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books.”
― Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions

“White people are drawn to farmer’s markets like moths to a flame. In fact, white people have such strong instincts that if
you release a white person into a random Saturday morning they will return to you with a reusable bag full of fruits and vegetables.”
― Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions

“It is the dream of every white person to be able to resolve all conflicts by complaining to unrelated parties. Because of this, white people are able to endure years of frustration and anger without saying a word in the hopes that everything will just work itself out without having to make a scene.”
― Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander