Top 400 Brit Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Memory works that way – like seeing forward and backward at the same time.”

— Brit Bennett

102. “In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

— Brit Bennett

103. “All of her blessings had come so easily in the beginning of her life, and she’d spent the back half losing them all.”

— Brit Bennett

104. “People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable. Some things you could never learn about yourself – some things nobody could learn about you until after you died.”

— Brit Bennett

105. “Your mama still got some of that in her. She still think she better than us.” She didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”

— Brit Bennett

106. “If nakedness would not reveal who you were, then what would?”

— Brit Bennett

107. “She couldn’t imagine living like this – hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.”

— Brit Bennett

108. “Besides, Jude wasn’t like Sam either. She was, in a way, like Stella. Private, like if she told you anything about herself, she was giving away something she could never get back.”

— Brit Bennett

109. “Her father had punched walls, he smashed dishes, and even once his own eyeglasses, hurling them across the living room at the door. To be so angry that you’d make yourself blind. Strange, and yet so normal to her then in a way she wouldn’t fully realize until she was older.”

— Brit Bennett

110. “Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.”

— Brit Bennett

111. “Then she put on a big Charity Harris smile, opening the door. She would disappear inside herself, inside these empty homes where nobody actually lived. As the room filled with strangers, she always found her mark, guiding a couple through the kitchen, pointing out the light fixtures, backsplash, high ceilings. “Imagine your life here,” she said. “Imagine who you could be.”

— Brit Bennett

112. “In Blake’s mind, her life before him had been tragic, her whole family swallowed up. She preferred him to think of her that way. Blank. A curtain hung between her past and present and she could never peek behind it. Who knows what might scuttle through?”

— Brit Bennett

113. “Once you mixed with common blood, you were common forever.”

— Brit Bennett

114. “But then Desiree felt hated and Stella felt ignored. That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way.”

— Brit Bennett

115. “He’d always wondered what the inside of the doll might look like. For some reason, he’d thought the cotton would be brown.”

— Brit Bennett

116. “In the morning, during her ride to Maison Blanche, she closed her eyes and slowly became her. She imagined another life, another past. No footsteps thundering up the porch steps, no ruddy white man grabbing her father, no Mr. Dupont pressing against her in the pantry. No Mama, no Desiree. She let her mind go blank, her whole life vanishing, until she became new and clean as a baby.”

— Brit Bennett

117. “Jude Winston’s hometown, which had never been a town at all, no longer existed.”

— Brit Bennett

118. “Losing a twin. Must be like losing half of yourself.”

— Brit Bennett

119. “True acting meant becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.”

— Brit Bennett

120. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

121. “You shouldn’t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it. And I think you want to know now.”

— Brit Bennett

122. “You could live a life this way, split. As long as you knew who was in charge.”

— Brit Bennett

123. “The key to staying lost was to never love anything. This was his gift, a short-memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.”

— Brit Bennett

124. “You know what your problem is?” a director had told her once. “You consider yourself your most fascinating subject.” She’d always thought everyone felt like a lead character onstage, surrounded by sidekicks and villains and love interests. She still couldn’t tell which bit role Jude was playing in her life, but she wasn’t even registering in Jude’s.”

— Brit Bennett

125. “Jude wanted to change and she didn’t see why it should be so hard or why she should have to explain it to anyone.”

— Brit Bennett

126. “They thought King was an impressive speaker, maybe even agreed with some of his ideas. They wouldn’t have sent a bullet into his head – they might have even cried watching his funeral, that poor young family – but they still wouldn’t have allowed the man to move into their neighborhood.”

— Brit Bennett

127. “Her body changed, his body changing, familiar and foreign at the same time. 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

128. “She had never imagined that Stella kept big secrets from her. Not Stella, who’d slept beside her, whose thoughts ran like a current between them, whose voice she heard in her own head.”

— Brit Bennett

129. “You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood.”

— Brit Bennett

130. “But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.”

— Brit Bennett

131. “He would live a small life, and instead of depressing him, the thought became comforting. For the first time, he no longer felt trapped. Instead, he felt safe. He.”

— Brit Bennett

132. “On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese.”

— Brit Bennett

133. “The shows seemed like the perfect form for her. Each day, the stories inching forward, but at the end of the week, the world essentially unchanged, the characters exactly who they had always been.”

— Brit Bennett

134. “So focused on what was next that she didn’t appreciate what she’d already gotten away with.”

— Brit Bennett

135. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

136. “By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

— Brit Bennett

137. “By 1986, Mallard had been scrubbed off every transit map in the area. For most folks, the name change didn’t mean much. Mallard had always been more of an idea than a place, and an idea couldn’t be redefined by geographical terms.”

— Brit Bennett

138. “He respected the natural order of things but you didn’t have to be cruel about it.”

— Brit Bennett

139. “She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted.”

— Brit Bennett

140. “Three times he’d touched her and himself too, panting, his breath thick with brandy, while she tried to get away, but the pantry was too small and he was too strong, pressing her against the shelves. Then it was over, as quick as it started. Soon her fear of him became worse than the touching. All the days she worried that he might creep up behind her ruined the ones when he didn’t.”

— Brit Bennett

141. “Aubrey wondered if they were the only ones who felt they didn’t know their mothers. Maybe mothers were inherently vast and unknowable.”

— Brit Bennett

142. “The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.”

— Brit Bennett

143. “She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women – each real, each a lie.”

— Brit Bennett

144. “She had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time, her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be?”

— Brit Bennett

145. “Won’t be easy,” he said. “Wasn’t easy for me. You know a man smacked me once at church? Right on the back of my neck. All because I put my finger in the holy water before his wife. Like I ruined it somehow. I thought my uncle was gonna stick up for me. I don’t know why, I just thought. But he told the man sorry like I done somethin wrong.”

— Brit Bennett

146. “The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.”

— Brit Bennett

147. “All over the city, couples doing what they were doing. Teenagers kissing on blankets at a beach, the ocean rolling in black. Newlyweds fumbling in a hotel room. A man whispering into his lover’s ear. A woman holding a match to a slender candle, her face glowing off the kitchen window. Across the city, darkness and light.”

— Brit Bennett

148. “Stella would tell her because the woman was leaving; in hours, she’d vanish from this part of the city and Stella’s life forever. 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.”

— Brit Bennett

149. “Likely does not mean certain. Improbable does not mean impossible.”

— Brit Bennett

150. “She’d wandered through the house, admiring the long white couches and marble countertops and the giant glass windows that faded into a view of the beach. She couldn’t imagine living like this – hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.”

— Brit Bennett