Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“God can be everywhere at the same time if he wants, but he ain’t in every building that calls itself a church. You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“If a man decides you aren’t his friend, then you look like a fool trying to hang on to that title.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“Davy, if your cousin ain’t a racist, he is mighty goddamn comfortable with being around racists. That’s a distinction without a difference.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“It occurred to him no place was more confused by its past or more terrified of the future than the South.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The years don’t slow down any as they pass.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“life,”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“What it is to be a man,’ she said, ‘and to have days off.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.”
― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Yeah. Making money isn’t really that hard if you don’t care about breaking the law and you don’t get caught,” Roman said.”
― S.A. Cosby, King of Ashes

“The book said a sociopath doesn’t have any difficulty lying because they don’t have the same emotional responses as non-sociopaths. Essentially, they don’t feel guilt.”
― S.A. Cosby, King of Ashes

“I’d learn that so many things that I thought were solid and structured in my life could be broken down, bit by bit, just like those buildings.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“That night, he went to jail because he was Black and a boy, and to the police, that fit the description of a criminal. I’d learn that Black kids didn’t get the luxury of appearing childlike and innocent, that from the moment we are born, some people start a clock on how long it’ll take the boys to commit a crime, the girls to seduce.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“quick something so special can turn to nothing.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“It didn’t matter if Mama nurtured or ignored him; the cowboys watched, waited for him, and then they decided it was time.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“I thought about how silly that was. That was the most dangerous part of the block? The demolished building? There wasn’t enough caution tape in the world for our neighborhood.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“Mama slept through the whole night. Maybe, as a mom, she had heavier guilt and stress about losing Meechie, and it dragged her down into a deep slumber.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“On the porch, I’d look at the beautiful skyline and the playground and people moving around, but not without that gate in my face; at Robert Taylor, we were always watching the world through those bars. Like we were in captivity and wouldn’t ever be free.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“we both missed our friends and weren’t really trying to replace them only to lose the new ones too.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“She wanted us to be tough. To stay focused. To remember, “If you want to be in a position where the government can’t uproot your life so easily, go get an education, and you’ll have more control over your situation.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“I looked at her. My eyes grew wider, because I realized that Mama Pearl was telling me that years ago, the same thing happening to us, happened already; that a whole neighborhood of Black people had to get up and leave because people with wealth and power wanted the land they’d settled on.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“The boys who done already made a plan for they lives, they do better than the ones who get invited into somebody else’s.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“I couldn’t tell by her expression if she felt disgust or sadness, but I knew that she was taking a moment before our departure to remember her childhood and also the many traumatic events that she’d lived through, especially losing her son to first a gang, then the criminal justice system.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street