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21 " When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries. "
― Brit Bennett , The Vanishing Half
22 " A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive. "
23 " You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same. "
24 " In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color. "
25 " Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what assassination meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point. Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on. "
26 " Sometimes who you were came down to the small things. "
27 " Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time. "
28 " The key to staying lost was to never love anything. "
29 " How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles? "
30 " That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way. "
31 " You didn't just find a self out there waiting. You had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be. "
32 " That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it. "
33 " Your guilt can't do nothin for me, honey. You want to go feel good about feelin bad, you can go on and do it right across the street. "
34 " You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both. "
35 " She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white. "
36 " She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you. "
37 " All of her blessings had come so easily in the beginning of her life, and she'd spent the back half losing them all. "
38 " She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted. "
39 " But maybe in those seven minutes they'd first been apart, they'd each lived a lifetime, setting out their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be. "
40 " Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. "