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101 " 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, "
― Brit Bennett , The Mothers
102 " 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. "
103 " She was startled by how rarely she had been alone back then. Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor. She "
104 " She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting. "
105 " We tried to love the world. We cleaned after this world, scrubbed its hospital floors and ironed its shirts, sweated in its kitchens and spooned school lunches, cared for its sick and nursed its babies. But the world didn’t want us, so we left and gave our love to Upper Room. "
106 " The white girls ended up in trouble as often as us colored girls. But at least we had the decency to keep our troubles. "
107 " Maybe it was easier to exit while she was still young and capable than wait for her own eventual decline. The "
108 " 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. "
109 " She was spare with her affection, even to Finch, as if the two were in a competition fighting to be the one who seemed to care the least. "
110 " He missed falling into those neat lines. He wanted to get back into football shape, stop eating fried food between shifts, stop drinking beer and smoking weed, and start treating his body like a machine again, an unfeeling, unwanting thing. "
111 " 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? "
112 " 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. But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. "
113 " He had been—three times before—so he was the marrying type, just not the stay-married type. "
114 " 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. "
115 " He had lived with death, so he knew there was nothing brave in not fearing it. The only people who didn’t were those stupid enough to not know the reality of it. "
116 " She and Nadia lived on a forever tilting floor between love and envy, and she finally felt that floor tilt until she could stand. "
117 " she imagined her life caught between his teeth, her trusting him not to bite. Two "
118 " Luke drained his beer, watching the flame above them flicker and dance. He felt pitiful, but if a man couldn’t feel pitiful late at night after drinking too much, when could he? "
119 " She hadn’t told Mrs. Sheppard about Paul, who drank bottles of whiskey on weekends and sometimes hit them but always cried about it after because he didn’t mean to, his job was so stressful, they just didn’t know what it was like, being out on the streets all the time, not knowing if you’d make it home. "
120 " Suddenly the night crackled with promise. She could be a different girl tonight, the type who could talk to strange men and not feel scared. "