Home > Author > Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
1 " Buy One Get One stops for no one. "
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah , Friday Black
2 " People say “sell your soul” like it’s easy. But your soul is yours and it’s not for sale. Even if you try, it’ll still be there, waiting for you to remember it. "
3 " Emmanuel started learning the basics of his Blackness before he knew how to do long division: smiling when angry, whispering when he wanted to yell. "
4 " Even the apocalypse isn't the end. That, you could only know when you're standing before a light so bright it obliterates you. And if you are alone, posed like a dancer, when it comes, you feel silly and scared. And if you are with your family, or anyone at all, when it comes, you feel silly and scared, but at least not alone. "
5 " I had become a devotee to a religion of my own creation. Its most integral ritual was maintaining a precise calm especially when angry, when hurt, when terrified. "
6 " I locate: your life is in the hands of someone who doesn't even know you and thinks you don't deserve it. "
7 " I’m trying to be nice because I’m transcending, but I really don’t fuck with you. Get it? "
8 " even though I’m being true, they’d say I was being emotional and it was clouding my truth. "
9 " Adulthood is paying the meter on time, I thought. "
10 " I’d learned that many of the things I loved, the comforts that made me feel good about myself, could disappear very slowly and also suddenly. "
11 " Working here, I've learned that married men use their wives as mirrors. "
12 " The woman glanced toward Emanuel as he sat. She smiled faintly. Her look of general disinterest made his heart sing. He turned his hat forward and felt his Blackness ease back to a still very serious 7.6. "
13 " We’re in How-It-Was class. "
14 " I walked toward the entrance thinking, Remember this: the first time you drove a parent to a hospital. "
15 " The apocalypse wanes naught to Colgate. "
16 " My client, Mister George Dunn, believed he was in danger. And you know what, if you believe something, anything, then that’s what matters most. Believing. In America we have the freedom to believe. America, our beautiful sovereign state. Don’t kill that here today. "
17 " She once told the entire class that her dog, one of those little living-accessory dogs that spends most of its life in a pleather handbag, hung itself by slipping through the beams of her deck after securing the other end of the leash beneath one of the patio chairs. She said it was proof that even animals could think and feel. I think she wanted us to become vegetarians. "
18 " We're like old friends now. The kind that know the worst about each other and don't always speak but check in enough and decorate the internet with pictures of each other's kids. "
19 " Nothing is more boring than a happy ending. "
20 " Get out of here!” I yell to Richard. He runs to the register where he’ll be backup to the backup safe. Maybe eighty people rush through the gate, clawing and stampeding. Pushing racks and bodies aside. Have you ever seen people run from a fire or gunshots? It’s like that, with less fear and more hunger "
