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41 " I know that the moment between when ablack boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostratein his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacitconversation that is happening beyond him, that has happenedbefore him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes. "
― Raven Leilani , Luster
42 " Even if I have done the adequate mental jujitsu to convince myself that I appear like a normal human being, a trip to the bathroom to regroup can on occasion turn into the kind of fun-house voodoo that happens in DMV photos and long exposures of Victorian children. There is something about looking into someone else’s mirror, something that always gives me more information than I need. "
43 " Maybe she is too much like me, too much like my mother, teetering silently on some horrific precipice in her teenage years until she comes out the other side as the woman I couldn’t be, a woman with good credit and hope and who is terrifying in her conviction to be whatever it is she wants to be. "
44 " She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she’s seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find that it is pristine. "
45 " We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal. "
46 " Trinidadian men do not just have eyelashes for days, they have something more subliminal that does not make itself known to you until it is nuclear and you are stuck with eleven kids in Jamaica, Queens, while he is tickling ivories for a traveling circus. "
47 " She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt. "
48 " God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die. "
49 " A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. "
50 " Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone. "
51 " A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. "
52 " When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge. "
53 " killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be black. "
54 " found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles. "
55 " She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she's seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find it is pristine. "
56 " There are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void. "
57 " She shows me the towels and suggests that I wash up. When I emerge from the shower, a dress is laid out on the bed, cornflower blue and immediately recognizable to me as something I would likely never be able to afford, a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep. "
58 " Grandma was a sheltered southern belle from Kentucky. The sort of high-yellow woman who believed her fair complexion was the result of an errant Native American gene, but who was, like so many of us, walking proof of American industry, the bolls and ships and casual sexual terrorism that put a little cream in the coffee and made her family loyal to the almighty paper bag. "
59 " There is nothing I can do to level the playing field. Some men at least have the decency to guide you immediately to all the things that are wrong with them. But everything I’ve seen of Eric, I want to see again. "
60 " So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit. "