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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A woman who can talk sports and talk trash? A fucking sparkling unicorn.
My mom used to say it took a crow bar to pry me open,
“You’re a great player, August.” She tips up on her toes until her lips are at my ear. “But I think you’ll be an even greater man.”
“Even when you think you’re defeated, dig deeper. Go harder. Press, because there is something worth it on the other side.”
avuncular
“Mes filles,
“But the girl I met in that bar didn’t want to be taken care of. I’d do everything in my power to help you follow your dreams so you could take care of yourself. And then we’d both know you were with me because you wanted to be, not because you had no other choice.”
“Some things don’t get do-overs. Not some forty-year-old man taking your virginity before you even have your first period. Not your own mother choosing him over you and shipping you off to the bayou to live with your great-grandmother.”
I’m willing to ride through hell on gasoline wheels for this little girl.
“It’s all arranged, though,” Sylvia continues . . . nervously? Yes, nervously. She doesn’t know Caleb is a predator, but on some cellular level, maybe atavistically, her body knows, and it makes her nervous. The heart speaks in whispers. I heard too late.
Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work.
“If you were mine, Iris, there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.”
Yesterday’s regrets make today’s sorrows.
“Breathe in truth.”
“You are pure. You are enough. You are strong.”
“Yes.” MiMi’s affirmation infuses the air with power. “Strength. Dignity. Courage. All these things belong to you. Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.” Yours to keep and yours to share.
“Struggle does not make you weak,” she whispers back. “Struggling against those who hold us is what makes us, over time, stronger than they are. Strong enough to fight back. Strong enough to win.”
deltaic
“Your dreams and ambitions got swallowed up when you had to follow Caleb,” I say, holding her eyes with mine. “I want you to know there’s someone who will follow you.”
“But staying here,” I cut in, caressing the fullness of her bottom lip with my thumb. “Staying is my best shot at winning you.”
centripetal,
Life isn’t a road that forks or a line of numbered sliding doors. There is no alternate universe filled with only right choices. There’s just this one—just this life, and we go where our choices take us and grow wiser from our mistakes.
During the day, when things are brightest, we don’t see the stars, but they are there. It’s only in the contrast of night, when things are darkest, that the stars shine.
Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.
