Top 400 Brit Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 9

401. “She told him that she used to have nightmares when she was young, too, and she never remembered them either.”

— Brit Bennett

402. “They both found each other’s lives inscrutable, and wasn’t that the only way it could be? Didn’t Jude wonder what it would be like to care so little about your education, to know that even if the worst happened, you would be all right?”

— Brit Bennett

403. “I love shopping,′ she said, almost to herself. ‘It’s like trying on all the other people you could be.”

— Brit Bennett

404. “Two years of school, which discouraged him, but Aubrey said the time would pass anyway-why not spend it chasing after something he wanted?”

— Brit Bennett

405. “Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.”

— Brit Bennett

406. “It’s not about making a point,” Loretta said. “The school’s right down the street and Cindy’s just as smart as all those other kids.”

— Brit Bennett

407. “For most people, the heart decided, not the mind.”

— Brit Bennett

408. “We love you,” he said. “We wouldn’t lie to you.” But sometimes lying was an act of love.”

— Brit Bennett

409. “She needed a job. Money. A plan. But those children staring at her daughter. The deputy dismissing her. Sam gripping her throat. She waved over Lorna again, wanting to forget it all.”

— Brit Bennett

410. “Once a woman from the county came by to check on Adele.”

— Brit Bennett

411. “For the first time in ten years, he was staring at Desiree Vignes’s face.”

— Brit Bennett

412. “She would hear a funny joke on the streetcar or pass a friend they once knew and she would turn to tell Stella, “Hey did you – ” before remembering that she was gone. That she had left Desiree, for the first time ever, alone.”

— Brit Bennett

413. “Her real life seemed even more fake by comparison. And yet, she didn’t want to stay away, not even now, not when Loretta was angry at her.”

— Brit Bennett

414. “Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other making up for what the other lacked.”

— Brit Bennett

415. “But then Desiree’s reflection appeared behind her, and Stella looked away, ashamed, almost, to be seen wanting anything at all.”

— Brit Bennett

416. “She laughed again, touching the back of his neck, and later, he would tell her that was the first time he knew. That gentle hand on the back of his neck as he steered the car across the bridge. –.”

— Brit Bennett

417. “Stella seemed as predictable as a reflection.”

— Brit Bennett

418. “How Desiree never wanted to be a part of the town that was her birthright.”

— Brit Bennett

419. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

420. “All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

— Brit Bennett

421. “Do you think – ” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?” “I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said. “Do you think he loved me?” Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.”

— Brit Bennett

422. “Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.”

— Brit Bennett

423. “Nothing made a boy less exciting than the fact that you were supposed to like him.”

— Brit Bennett

424. “She was a good woman. The more time he spent around her, the more he realized how rarely he thought anybody else was actually good. Nice, maybe, but niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.”

— Brit Bennett

425. “The twins used to love hiding behind the quilts and sheets before Desiree realized how humiliating it was, your home always filled with strangers’ dirty things.”

— Brit Bennett

426. “She was exhausted but still laughed at the sight of him, as unexpected as the sudden coming of spring. One day there was frost, and the next, bloom.”

— Brit Bennett

427. “Desiree admitting that she’d been impulsive, Stella that she was only being loyal.”

— Brit Bennett

428. “Losing a twin. Must.”

— Brit Bennett

429. “When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be.”

— Brit Bennett

430. “But sometimes lying was an act of love.”

— Brit Bennett

431. “She couldn’t have said no to him, she’d since realised, but she didn’t want to. And maybe that was the difference, or maybe, the difference was in thinking that there was one at all.”

— Brit Bennett

432. “Stella wouldn’t even hire colored help for the house – she claimed Mexicans worked harder.”

— Brit Bennett

433. “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.”

— Brit Bennett

434. “She never felt darker than when she was running, and at the same time, she never felt less black, less anything.”

— Brit Bennett

435. “Good,” he said. “You got beautiful skin.” He glanced at her, but she looked away, staring down at the photo paper as an abandoned building shimmered into view. She hated to be called beautiful. It was the type of thing people only said because they felt they ought to. She thought about Lonnie Goudeau kissing her under the moss trees or inside the stables or behind the Delafosse barn at night. In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.”

— Brit Bennett

436. “And that’s how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.”

— Brit Bennett

437. “There could have been fifty pairs of twins sitting at that dinner table, a seat for each person they had been since they’d spoken last: a battered wife and a bored one, a waitress and a professor, each woman seated next to a stranger.”

— Brit Bennett

438. “She’d grown up in her mother’s eyes, no longer her daughter but a separate woman, complete with her own secrets.”

— Brit Bennett

439. “Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.”

— Brit Bennett

440. “The morning one of the twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.”

— Brit Bennett

441. “His mother, rest her soul, had hated his lightness; when he was a boy, she’d shoved him under the sun, begging him to darken.”

— Brit Bennett