Top 400 Brit Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Passed down through the family, Early told him. Like most truths, it sounded a little phony.”

— Brit Bennett

152. “Now her sister had decided she’d rather be white and her mother blamed her because Stella was no longer there to blame.”

— Brit Bennett

153. “That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone.”

— Brit Bennett

154. “She would talk to her mother on the phone, days later, and not say a word about Stella. Maybe she was like her aunt in that way. Maybe, like Stella, she became a new person in each place she’d lived, and she was already unrecognizable to her mother, a girl who hoarded secrets. A liar.”

— Brit Bennett

155. “She’d live a life split between two women – each real, each a lie.”

— Brit Bennett

156. “A hurt bird always returns to its nest, a hurting woman no different.”

— Brit Bennett

157. “Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back? That was the part that Jude could never understand.”

— Brit Bennett

158. “They weren’t far from home but this was Los Angeles. You could cover a lifetime in eleven miles.”

— Brit Bennett

159. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

160. “That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way. Her blessing had been doomed from the beginning, her girls as impossible to please as jealous gods.”

— Brit Bennett

161. “Playing white to get ahead was just good sense. But marrying a dark man? Carrying his blueblack child? Desiree Vignes had courted the type of trouble that would never leave.”

— Brit Bennett

162. “There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.”

— Brit Bennett

163. “Once, when she was thirteen, her mother had brought her to the mall to buy a new dress for her birthday. Kennedy was beginning to pull away by then, wishing she could have gone to Bloomingdale’s with her girlfriends instead. But her mother was barely focusing on her. She paused in the middle of the shop floor, fingering the lacy sleeves of a black gown. “I love shopping,” she’d said, almost to herself. “It’s like trying on all the other people you could be.”

— Brit Bennett

164. “Now, seven years later, Therese Anne Carter was only a name on a birth certificate in the offices of Union County Public Records. No one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.”

— Brit Bennett

165. “A lowly orphan, alone in the city. If he pitied her, he wouldn’t be able to see her clearly. He would refract all of her lies through her mourning, mistake her reticence about her past for grief.”

— Brit Bennett

166. “In New Orleans, Stella split in two. She didn’t notice it at first because she’d been two people her whole life: she was herself and she was Desiree.”

— Brit Bennett

167. “The last thing she wanted was to love someone else who looked just like herself.”

— Brit Bennett

168. “They’re gonna hate me anyway,” Loretta said. “Might as well hate me in my big house with all of my nice things.”

— Brit Bennett

169. “Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.”

— Brit Bennett

170. “Well, she isn’t you,” Peg said. “It’s unfair for you to expect her to be.”

— Brit Bennett

171. “She was one of the lucky ones. A husband who adored her, a happy daughter, a beautiful home.”

— Brit Bennett

172. “For the first time, she dropped the bravado, looking so genuinely unsure of herself that Jude almost squeezed her hand. The sudden rush of empathy startled her. Was that what it was like to be this girl? An unwise choice earning you sympathy, not scorn, a single moment of doubt forcing a practical stranger to affirm that you were, in fact, special? “No one gets into med school either,” Jude said.”

— Brit Bennett

173. “There could have been fifty pairs of twins sitting at that dinner table, a seat for each person they had been since they’s spoken last: a battered wife and a bored one, a waitress and a professor, each woman seated next to a stranger. Instead, there were only the twins, Early sitting between them. He felt, watching Stella primly cut her fish, that he didn’t know Desiree at all, that maybe it was impossible to know one without the other.”

— Brit Bennett

174. “Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else.”

— Brit Bennett

175. “It’s terribly difficult to quit. All the best things are.”

— Brit Bennett

176. “She didn’t feel unburdened by sharing hard truths. Hard truths never lightened.”

— Brit Bennett

177. “For the first time in her life, she didn’t worry about any of the practical details when she told Blake Sanders yes. The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.”

— Brit Bennett

178. “It’s too much,” she said. “I can’t go back through that door. It’s another life, you understand?”

— Brit Bennett

179. “She had been acting her entire life, which meant that she was the best liar that she knew. Well, second best.”

— Brit Bennett

180. “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

181. “She would get no darker, although she seemed to the longer she lived in Mallard. A black dot in the school pictures, a dark speck on the pews at Sunday Mass, a shadow lingering on the riverbank while the other children swam. So black that you could see nothing but her. A fly in milk, contaminating everything.”

— Brit Bennett

182. “But the passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse.”

— Brit Bennett

183. “She would look at him and forget that there had ever been a time he’d hidden from her. He unzipped her funeral dress, folding it neatly on a rock, and they waded into the cold water, squealing, water inching up their thighs. This river, like all rivers, remembered its course. They floated under the leafy canopy of trees, begging to forget.”

— Brit Bennett

184. “A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest.”

— Brit Bennett

185. “Her father had been so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn his arm over to see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the white men came for him, so how could she care about lightness after that?”

— Brit Bennett

186. “Desiree knew because Stella had done it in New Orleans. Slipped out of one life into another as easily as stepping into the next room.”

— Brit Bennett

187. “Whenever they hung up, Jude always felt a little guilty knowing that the life she most feared was the one her mother was already living. Waiting tables forever, living in a cramped home. At least she had Reese. At least she wasn’t in Mallard.”

— Brit Bennett

188. “They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow. She was amazed by how well she remembered. At that party, she forced herself to laugh, even though she’d found nothing funny at the time. The jokes were true. She was black.”

— Brit Bennett

189. “Around them, the night hung heavy and damp like soaked cotton. She tasted the sugar off his lips.”

— Brit Bennett

190. “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she would say. “It’s your life.” “But it’s not,” Stella would say. “None of it belongs to me.” “Well, you chose it,” Loretta would tell her. “So that makes it yours.”

— Brit Bennett

191. “Nobody had warned her of this as a girl, when they carried on over her beautiful light complexion – how easily her skin would wear the mark of an angry man.”

— Brit Bennett

192. “She was twenty-four then, still romanced by the idea of her own suffering.”

— Brit Bennett

193. “Inside the empty diner, Jude sat at the counter, reading a book. She was always reading, always alone.”

— Brit Bennett

194. “She leaned against the counter, watching the girl drink, searching her face for anything that reminded her of her daughters. But she could only see the child’s evil daddy. Hadn’t she told Desiree that a dark man would be no good to her? Hadn’t she tried to warn her all her life? A dark man would trample her beauty. He’d love it at first but like anything he desired and could never attain, he would soon grow to resent it. Now he was punishing her for it.”

— Brit Bennett

195. “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

196. “TV loves a black woman judge,” Pam told her. “It’s funny – can you imagine what this world would look like if we decided what’s fair?”

— Brit Bennett

197. “You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself.”

— Brit Bennett

198. “The drugs bothered Stella less than the indiscretion. Only a lazy girl would get caught, and her daughter was clever but lazy, blissfully unaware of how hard her mother worked to maintain the lie that was her life.”

— Brit Bennett

199. “Her daughter felt like a stranger, and maybe, if she was still in Mallard, she would be amused by all the ways that they were different. By all the ways her daughter reminded her of Desiree, even – she might laugh with her sister about it. Are you sure she’s not yours? But here in this world, her daughter felt like a stranger and it terrified her. If her daughter didn’t feel like she was really hers, then nothing about her life was real.”

— Brit Bennett

200. “Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it.”

— Brit Bennett