Home > Work > The Mothers

The Mothers QUOTES

The Mothers QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Mothers

2 " 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 , The Mothers

3 " 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 , The Mothers

4 " 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 , The Mothers

5 " 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 , The Mothers

6 " 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 , The Mothers

7 " 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 , The Mothers

8 " The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. "

― Brit Bennett , The Mothers

9 " Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead. "

― Brit Bennett , The Mothers

10 " 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 , The Mothers

11 " 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 , The Mothers

12 " 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 , The Mothers

13 " 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 , The Mothers

14 " Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around. "

― Brit Bennett , The Mothers

15 " 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 , The Mothers

16 " 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 , The Mothers

17 " 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 , The Mothers

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

― Brit Bennett , The Mothers

19 " 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 , The Mothers

20 " We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. 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 , The Mothers