Holiday’s Reviews > How Beautiful We Were > Status Update

Older boys lingered around them, and Thula would sometimes converse and smile, but she did not put down her books. It was as if she was trying to send a message to the boys: If you want to get to me, you must prove yourself worthy of my putting down my book for you.

I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest, cleanest water.

A man's anger is often no more than a safe haven for his cowardice.

He is learning, just as we're unlearning, that sometimes the best way forward is to do as commanded and offer no resistance.

His father must have shown him how to pick up scraps; soon he'll teach his son how to do the same - smile, nod, take whatever they give you, thank them profusely, ask no questions, let them know they own the air you breathe.

She might be the closest I'll have to having a daughter in a while. That is why I want, desperately, as impossible as it seems, for her to grow up to be an unshackled woman, so that I may tell my brother when we meet again, that though I'd failed at saving him from whoever felled him, I hadn't failed in keeping his children safe by doing everything I could so they could grow up in a clean Kosowa.

We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Why wouldn't they ask their friends at Pexton to stop killing us? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us?