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We Love You, Charlie Freeman QUOTES

We Love You, Charlie Freeman QUOTES

1 " But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

2 " I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

3 " And Charles turned around and called back without thinking, 'You know, you're awfully lucky you boys are white.'
He didn't know why he said it. It had broken out of him. He'd wanted to speak with love: that was all that he'd asked for that day, but now there was a shocked silence. Oh shit, Charles thought. I'm fired for sure. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

4 " What I envy is not their skin but their insouciance. I envy the freedom to sin with only a little bit of consequence, to commit one selfish act and not have it mean the downfall of my entire people. Where indecency and mischief do not mean annihilation. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

5 " Last period of the day. Charles had decided that morning that he would talk about tessellations. Last period, they should have been covering sines and cosines. They should have been starting to graph, but he just didn't have it in him. Tessellations were his favorite. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

6 " Marie's loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the while children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

7 " I am not beautiful and I am sarcastic and I believe I am better than most in this town and that is why I am a thirty-six-year-old orphan with no husband and why no man in Spring City has ever even held my hand. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

8 " Guilt is different from shame. It has a different weight. Shame just heavies the bones, in a most insinuating way, rousing them to a dense, salty jelly. Guilt, though, is quick and hot and silvery, and it flashes through you with the regular, metered pulse of an electrical current, animating everything inside you to do something, anything, to make the shock stop. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman

9 " faith and trust in the kindness of others is a hard-won oblivion, is a very strong armor. It may hurt, in the short run, to have an open, trusting heart. It may mean, in the short run, that you are weak. But in the long run it can mean survival. It takes a kind of courage to be kind. "

― Kaitlyn Greenidge , We Love You, Charlie Freeman