Top 400 Brit Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Well, she isn’t you,” Peg said. “It’s unfair for you to expect her to be.”

— Brit Bennett

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Brit Bennett

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

— Brit Bennett

206. “It’s too late,” she said. “Even if she comes back. She’s already gone.”

— Brit Bennett

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

— Brit Bennett

208. “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

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

— Brit Bennett

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

— Brit Bennett

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Brit Bennett

219. “Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.”

— Brit Bennett

220. “Being half lost was worse than being fully lost. It was impossible to know which part of you knew the way.”

— Brit Bennett

221. “You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.”

— Brit Bennett

222. “She glanced toward the dark woods and nodded. He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.”

— Brit Bennett

223. “Her memories ebbing and flowing like the tide.”

— Brit Bennett

224. “He loved taking pictures of anything but himself.”

— Brit Bennett

225. “Only thing waitin for you out there is wildness,” her mother always said, which of course made Desiree want to go even more.”

— Brit Bennett

226. “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?”

— Brit Bennett

227. “Her own home was simple, a marker of good taste.”

— Brit Bennett

228. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

229. “Through the gauzy blue fabric, you could barely see the bruise.”

— Brit Bennett

230. “She’d always felt like the older sister, even though she only was by a matter of minutes. But maybe in those seven minutes they’d first been apart, they’d each lived a lifetime, setting out on their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be.”

— Brit Bennett

231. “I never seen a child that black before.”

— Brit Bennett

232. “It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.”

— Brit Bennett

233. “A town always looked different once you’d returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn’t mistake it for a stranger’s house but you’d keeping banging your shins on the table corners.”

— Brit Bennett

234. “She finally unlatched the screen door and stepped barefoot onto the porch. Early eased toward her. He smelled like sandalwood and sweat, and as he neared, she thought, for one breathless second, that he might kiss her. But he didn’t. He lifted his fig to her lips. She bit where his mouth had been.”

— Brit Bennett

235. “Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. ‘We were poor,’ her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.”

— Brit Bennett

236. “Passing like this, from moment to moment, was funny. Heroic, even. Who didn’t want to get over on white folks for a change?”

— Brit Bennett

237. “Maybe she would have been able to endure all this if it weren’t for everyone’s obsession with lightness. Syl Guillory and Jack Richard arguing in the barber shop about whose wife was fairer, or her mother yelling after her to always wear a hat, or people believing ridiculous things, like drinking coffee or eating chocolate while pregnant might turn a baby dark.”

— Brit Bennett

238. “She was living a performance where there could be no audience.”

— Brit Bennett

239. “Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe the’d spent their lives together modulating each other making up for what the other lacked.”

— Brit Bennett

240. “He wasn’t her boyfriend. She’d never been foolish enough to think that he might be. But she couldn’t imagine any boy loving her; it was enough that Lonnie noticed her at all.”

— Brit Bennett

241. “I always wanted to go to college,” Stella said. “You still could.” Stella laughed, gesturing around the neighborhood. “Why would I?” “I don’t know. Because you want to?”

— Brit Bennett

242. “Ain’t right to leave like this,” he said. “Without sayin good-bye.”

— Brit Bennett

243. “He was, in a way, exactly how she’d remembered him, tall and leanly muscled like a wild cat. But even in the hazy bar, she could read hard years in his eyes, and his weariness startled her. He scratched the scruff on his chin, waving over Lorna and pointing lazily to Desiree’s glass.”

— Brit Bennett

244. “One morning, the twins crowded in front of their bathroom mirror, four identical girls fussing with their hair.”

— Brit Bennett

245. “In the bathroom, he wrapped a towel around Reese’s neck and reached for his clippers. He gently pushed Reese’s head forward, and Reese closed his eyes, trying to remember the last time another man had touched him so tenderly.”

— Brit Bennett

246. “But what was different, exactly? A sister easier to shed than a daughter, a mother than a husband. What made her so easy to give away?”

— Brit Bennett

247. “She would later realize that these were signs that he truly came from wealth: how rarely he wore expensive clothes even though he could afford to, how little he talked about his father or his inheritance.”

— Brit Bennett

248. “You only needed one yes to be happy- medical school was like love in that regard.”

— Brit Bennett

249. “She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

— Brit Bennett

250. “But that don’t make sense.” “Don’t have to. It’s white folks.”

— Brit Bennett