Top 400 Brit Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it.”

— Brit Bennett

352. “She barely remembered him now; it scared her a little. Life before he died seemed like only a story she’d been told.”

— Brit Bennett

353. “She didn’t like talking about Sam to Early, didn’t even want to imagine both men existing within the same expanse of her life. 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

354. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

355. “Imagine your life here,” she said. “Imagine who you could be.”

— Brit Bennett

356. “She spoke about her mother wistfully, the way everyone talked about Stella. That was the only part that felt real.”

— Brit Bennett

357. “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

358. “The key to staying lost was to never love anything.”

— Brit Bennett

359. “Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning.”

— Brit Bennett

360. “That whole year, Jude had read every book she could find on Alzheimer’s disease. She studied the illness desperately, as if understanding it would make any difference. It didn’t, of course.”

— Brit Bennett

361. “But a week after Christmas, sitting around her sewing circle, she told Cath Johansen and Betsy Roberts that he made her uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” she said, plucking at her misplaced stitch. “I just never liked the way he looked at me.”

— Brit Bennett

362. “Her mother would never forget Stella. She would stare into the mirror for the rest of her life, reminded of her loss. But Jude wouldn’t add to her grief. 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

363. “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

364. “For months after the Walkers left, she’d fallen into a depression that was deep even by her own standards. She was grieving for reasons that she could never explain. Like she’d lost Desiree all over again.”

— Brit Bennett

365. “Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.”

— Brit Bennett

366. “They floated under the leafy canopy of trees, begging to forget.”

— Brit Bennett

367. “You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

— Brit Bennett

368. “They gone,” he said, when asked. “Gone folks is gone.”

— Brit Bennett

369. “The next century would be like this, he told her. The rich moving away from cities, locked behind giant gates like medieval lords building moats.”

— Brit Bennett

370. “BY SPRINGTIME, she spent every weekend with Reese, so inseparable that you began to ask for one if you saw the other.”

— Brit Bennett

371. “Big thinking crushed by reality-that’s what he’d inherited.”

— Brit Bennett

372. “In the dark, everyone was the same color.”

— Brit Bennett

373. “She was never up to anything, of course, her days blending together into a sameness that she later found comforting.”

— Brit Bennett

374. “The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided that it would be so.”

— Brit Bennett

375. “Well, maybe that’s your problem,” Kennedy said, “You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

— Brit Bennett

376. “Even the women were upset. They did not shout like the men but each had made a certain sacrifice in marrying a man who could afford a home in the most expensive new subdivision in Los Angeles County and she expected a return on that investment.”

— Brit Bennett

377. “But years later, the neighbors would only remember one person speaking up in the meeting, a single voice that had, somehow rosen above the noise.”

— Brit Bennett

378. “Desiree had spent years studying Stella.”

— Brit Bennett

379. “Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it.”

— Brit Bennett

380. “Around them, the night hung heavy and damp like soaked cotton.”

— Brit Bennett

381. “This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.”

— Brit Bennett

382. “To be honest about the past meant that he would be considered a liar.”

— Brit Bennett

383. “She’d done one interesting thing in her whole life, but she would spend the rest of her days hiding it.”

— Brit Bennett

384. “Her nightmares were always the same, white men grabbing her ankles and dragging her screaming out of the bed. She’d never told Desiree. Each time she’d snapped awake, Desiree snoring beside her, she felt stupid for being afraid. Hadn’t Desiree watched from that closet too? Hadn’t she seen what those white men had done? Then why wasn’t she waking up in the middle of the night, her heart pounding?”

— Brit Bennett

385. “She’ll get tired of all that playacting,” he said. “Bet she comes running back, feeling foolish.”

— Brit Bennett

386. “There was something freeing in admitting that you had been loved less. She might have gone her whole life not knowing, thinking that she was enjoying a feast when she had actually been picking at another’s crumbs.”

— Brit Bennett

387. “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. She was fascinated by the mystery of dissections as well as the challenge. They had to search for tiny nerves that were impossible to find. It was almost like a little treasure hunt.”

— Brit Bennett

388. “Summer was nearly over and she couldn’t bring herself to imagine autumn, scrubbing bathroom floors while her friends gossiped in the lunchroom and planned homecoming dances. Would this be the rest of her life? Constricted to a house that swallowed her as soon as she stepped inside?”

— Brit Bennett

389. “She furiously spread night cream on her face. Blake lingered behind her, unbuttoning his shirt. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. He didn’t look angry, only worried. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “The girls like playing together – ” “Then why wouldn’t you tell me? Why would you lie about going to Cath’s – ” “I don’t know!” she said. “I just thought – it seemed easier that way, all right? I knew you would have all your questions –.”

— Brit Bennett

390. “Northern racism, he knew. That southern kind, you could keep.”

— Brit Bennett

391. “The slap confused her less than the kiss after, her mother’s anger and love colliding together so violently.”

— Brit Bennett

392. “She’d apologized as much as she could, but even though her mother said she forgave her, she knew that something had shifted between them. She’d grown up in her mother’s eyes, no longer her daughter but a separate woman, complete with her own secrets.”

— Brit Bennett

393. “During training, she’d practiced reading her own fingerprints, those intricate designs that marked her as unique.”

— Brit Bennett

394. “Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money.”

— Brit Bennett

395. “That night, at the cast party, Jude spoke the word Mallard and it sounded like a song Kennedy hadn’t heard in years.”

— Brit Bennett

396. “This river, like all rivers, remember its course.”

— Brit Bennett

397. “Each morning, the twins disappeared inside the Duponts’ house and in the evening, they emerged exhausted, feet swollen, Desiree slumping against the bus window during the ride home.”

— Brit Bennett

398. “After the twins were born, Adele never built an altar. But later, after her girls disappeared, she wondered if she’d been arrogant. Maybe she should have just built the altar, no matter how foolish it sounded.”

— Brit Bennett

399. “Like most truths, it sounded a little phony.”

— Brit Bennett

400. “She’d never even been to New Orleans, only two hours away.”

— Brit Bennett