Brit Bennett Quotes & Sayings

She had been his first love, so maybe, in a way, she had the rightful claim to his heart. Maybe it was like how when you stepped out of the grocery store line to grab bread, no one could really be mad when you returned to your spot. It wasn't cutting if you had been there before. — Brit Bennett

A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about? - — Brit Bennett

She licked cinnamon sugar off her fingers, sun-heavy and happy, the type of happiness that before might have felt ordinary, but now seemed fragile, like if she stood too quickly, it might slide off her shoulders and break. — Brit Bennett

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled? — Brit Bennett

In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it? — Brit Bennett

This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn't imagine feeling satisfied. — Brit Bennett

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing. — Brit Bennett

Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see. — Brit Bennett

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead. — Brit Bennett

We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return. — Brit Bennett

At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints. She would always feel trapped behind that window, between her and the rest of the world, but at least in Ann Arbor, the glass was clearer. Whenever — Brit Bennett

Later that night, when we left the prayer room, we felt something in Upper Room shift. Couldn't explain it, something just felt different. We knew the walls of Upper Room like the walls of our own homes. We'd soft-stepped down hallways as the choir practiced, noticing that corner in front of the instrument closet where the paint had chipped, or the tile in the ladies' room that had been laid crooked. We'd spend decades studying the splotch that looked like an elephant's ear on the ceiling above the water fountain. And we knew the exact spot on the sanctuary carpet where Elise Turner had knelt the night before she killed herself. (The more spiritual of us even swore they could still see the indented curve from her knees.) Sometimes we joked that when we died, we'd all become part of these walls, pressed down flat like wallpaper. — Brit Bennett

He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe. He — Brit Bennett

If a man who knew you could hurt you, who knew what a man who didn't might do? "I'm — Brit Bennett

Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around. — Brit Bennett

Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more. — Brit Bennett

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full. "I'm — Brit Bennett

She should've felt glad, but she didn't. She wished her mother had at least thought about it. A fleeting thought when she'd left the doctor and envisioned her own mother's face. During a hushed phone call with the man she loved. When she'd called a clinic to make her appointment and hung up in tears, when she'd sat in the waiting room, holding her own hand. She could've been seconds away from doing it - it didn't matter. She hated the thought of her mother not wanting her but it would've been better to look at her mother's face in the mirror and know that they were alike. - — Brit Bennett

She'd thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn't find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently — Brit Bennett

It was strange learning the contours of another's loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges. — Brit Bennett

pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman's life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne. She — Brit Bennett

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. — Brit Bennett

Her left hand hanging out the window held no ring but we imagined she had a man somewhere, a man she could get rid of when she had the mind to because she would never put herself in the position to be left. — Brit Bennett

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't. — Brit Bennett

A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We'll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle. We — Brit Bennett

niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether. — Brit Bennett

years later, she wondered if that was the point, if sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying. The — Brit Bennett

The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them. — Brit Bennett

Sometimes she wondered if she only loved him when it was cold, in the middle of winter when everything was dead. - — Brit Bennett

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She's her mother's age now. Double her age. Our age. You're our mother. We're climbing inside of you. — Brit Bennett

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn't. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor's son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it. — Brit Bennett

Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know? — Brit Bennett

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain't-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain't about shit. — Brit Bennett

She'd already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference. — Brit Bennett

but it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it. Her — Brit Bennett

He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn't exist. — Brit Bennett

Could you be nostalgic for a friendship that wasn't over yet or did the fact that you were nostalgic mean that it already was? — Brit Bennett

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn't hide. — Brit Bennett

She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting. — Brit Bennett

sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying. — Brit Bennett

She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again. — Brit Bennett

No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him. Yes, — Brit Bennett

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. - — Brit Bennett

Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much. — Brit Bennett

she imagined her life caught between his teeth, her trusting him not to bite. Two — Brit Bennett

You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don't last. — Brit Bennett

Bones, like anything else, strong until they weren't. — Brit Bennett

Maybe you didn't know who you would be in the world. Maybe you were a different person everywhere you lived. "Tell — Brit Bennett

Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman's life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne. — Brit Bennett

We don't think of ourselves as "prayer warriors." A man must've come up with that term - men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don't even know. You close your eyes and listen to a request. Then you have to slip inside their body. You are Tracy Robinson, burning for whiskey. You are Cindy Harris's husband, searching your wife's phone. You are Earl Vernon, washing dirty knots out of your strung-out daughter's hair. If you don't become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words. That's — Brit Bennett