More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Beginning with breath,” Ma had said. “Listen for it, capture it, fight to control it; direct Breath, and the heart and mind will follow.”
Rosa remembered wondering how it was that boys had become so fragile that everything seemed to be set aside for them.
I sorta always figured if I was lucky enough to have a woman love me that I might like to be gentle with her in a way that the world aint want me to be with nobody else.
To Rosa, it felt as if Mamá had always been stingy with her love. Had Rosa not been in that wrong body, she would have been able to tell Mamá that hiding her love away made Rosa feel dirty, made Rosa wish to snatch it from wherever she could find it.
Both Papá and Mamá had wished to be angry, had wished to ask and answer questions of each other, but silence was peace, and Rosa was beginning to understand that perhaps for every marriage this must be both true and necessary.
There shoulda been more words to describe what I seent in my lifetime. And maybe there was. But I aint have em. “I never wanted the kinda life where you couldnt stay long enough to learn it. But then again, maybe there aint never enough time to learn life.”
To lose your life while still living it is to know no greater sorrow.
Rosa couldn’t recall if Jeremias had spoken directly to her since Mamá’s passing, but he spoke now as if there’d been no time at all between this time and the last. It was the sort of farce Rosa now understood was a necessity for any family to persist.
“You don’t sit on de river bed and talk de river bad,” Papá had said. “It’s your envy clouding your judgment.”
“Tomorrow, we will be past now,”
There are times when different things are needed, different people are needed to find your place in the world.”
he knew now that home was something that couldn’t be denied him; home was not one place but rather it was one experience after another, one memory after another that left one feeling as if one had become more of who one was to become.
