Imani Bennett

“If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Not in Love

“Whenever I’d imagined myself in a relationship, I’d envisioned an exhausting series of social niceties, facades to meticulously keep up, chitchat that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to produce even under duress.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Not in Love

“I feel myself begin to blush and I wonder at my inability to be so free with words and feelings. I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through.
Stuffed so full of people places things and ideas that I don’t know how to break out of my own brain. How to start a conversation. I want to trust but it scares the skin off my bones.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“I'd been an odd child, then an odd teenager. Then I'd become, maybe as a result, maybe unavoidably, an odd adult.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Not in Love