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He saw Renee’s face when he’d told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, ten years ago. The lips bloodless; the eyes stunned, like a struck child’s. But she’d lifted her chin and smiled, with the gallantry he’d loved in her.

“She has the vague fleeting sense of a life that will grow bigger, or wider open spaces, a purer love, voracious appetites.”

“she would be content to watch them live, working in the shadows so that everything was perfect, so that the mechanism never jammed. She has the intimate conviction now, the burning and painful conviction that her happiness belongs to them. That she is theirs and they are hers.”

“she would be content to watch them live, working in the shadows so that everything was perfect, so that the mechanism never jammed. She has the intimate conviction now, the burning and painful conviction that her happiness belongs to them. That she is theirs and they are hers.”

“We will, all of us, only be happy, she thinks, when we don’t need one another anymore. When we can live a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that has nothing to do with anyone else. When we are free.”

“I had vowed to find it within myself to see what I didn’t understand as adventure rather than a particular kind of hell, to be someone who was moved by other people’s attempts to be good and had the ability to sense the love in a room before anything else, but it was too hard. I could not.”

“I had vowed to find it within myself to see what I didn’t understand as adventure rather than a particular kind of hell, to be someone who was moved by other people’s attempts to be good and had the ability to sense the love in a room before anything else, but it was too hard. I could not.”

“I was old enough to understand how one of trauma’s many possible effects was to make the traumatized person insufferable, how my grandmother’s unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive and made her deserving of at least some compassion, but fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it? Why did she demand so much of it?”

“I was old enough to understand how one of trauma’s many possible effects was to make the traumatized person insufferable, how my grandmother’s unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive and made her deserving of at least some compassion, but fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it? Why did she demand so much of it?”

“I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them. I wanted white parents who didn’t care where I went or what I did, parents who encouraged me to leave home instead of guilting me into staying their kid forever.”

“I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them. I wanted white parents who didn’t care where I went or what I did, parents who encouraged me to leave home instead of guilting me into staying their kid forever.”

“maybe if I were really lucky I’d have a mother who didn’t feel like dying... maybe, just maybe, if she kept her sadness to herself, it would go away on its own, or at least soften, like all the times I kept my anger to myself while waiting for her to notice that something was wrong and I needed to be held, to be told I was her beloved and it broke her heart to know she had hurt me.”

“maybe if I were really lucky I’d have a mother who didn’t feel like dying... maybe, just maybe, if she kept her sadness to herself, it would go away on its own, or at least soften, like all the times I kept my anger to myself while waiting for her to notice that something was wrong and I needed to be held, to be told I was her beloved and it broke her heart to know she had hurt me.”

“I couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement every time we left a place... it was like that each time we loaded up our car and started driving to the next place and the next place and the next, and in a way it wasn’t so bad, it just meant there was no such thing as failure, only starting over a million times and then some.”

“it was understood that while I could still improve in either language, my parents could not, they were on a road to nowhere, the wall was right up against them, so it was up to me to get really good, it was up to me to shine and that scared me because I wanted to stay behind with them, I didn’t want to go any further than they could go.”