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sooooo messy

“Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. That was Mom and me. I was always the watcher, but with my father’s eyes on me, in these years, I became the dancer.”

the pace feels like it has completely 180’ed. more thoughts to come but whyyy. ugh

“Life really becomes an accumulation of losses, but this is something I hope you never have to learn.”

oh. I’m going to be sick

“Mom says we’re on The Great Adventure and that California is our religion.”

“Wynton sighed, guilt at the front door of his mind, banging on it with both fists.”

“When he wasn’t playing violin, he’d get bored. Like pour-gasoline-down-his-mouth-and-light-a-match bored. And he’d get this hungry feeling too, life-hungry, life-ravenous.”

“It was amazing how many things people said to you without actually saying them.”

“When he asked her to marry him on their grad night, Judy said yes and then she cried. It was only later that she would realize those tears came not from joy but from somewhere else deep inside, the place where she stuffed old hurts, where nothing ever really died, instead bubbling up to make happiness—even a proposal—ugly and dotted with rot.”

— oof that’s too close to home

“The whole house was like this: layers and layers of fingerprints and scars left by his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.”

oh my godddd

“Everywhere she looked, there were barriers to freedom, to the wildness she wished she could unleash in the world.”

pgs 102-114 — loved this chapter

“She considered the wounds, the hunger for survival that is passed down, repeated, and then passed down again, and wondered what she had already given her daughter without even knowing it.” — on intergenerational trauma

“If there was such a thing as a haunting through grief and absence, then she had been haunted her entire life.”

“In the summers, Alice liked to escape to the back garden, where her mother never ventured and where the signs of her father’s presence were not so stagnant, not so frozen at the very precise moment he died. The peonies he tied up, the magnolia he watered..”

love this imagery

“I don’t want the Danish in me to be something time makes me leave behind.”

“Grandma sees these things when she talks about them and gestures with her hands like she’s painting brush strokes in the air. The way Grandma paints her dream for me, there’s a low sky.”

“On that last day Mor took us up to the roof, she had calculated the difference between what we couldn’t have and her ability to watch us want. The difference between her pain and ours, she decided, measured nine stories high.”

“I am fourteen and know that I am black, but I can’t make the Gospel sound right from my mouth.”

“God stands to the side wondering why we keep asking for wishes to come true from empty chairs.”

“She parts my hair from the front to the back to make the line. I feel the line she makes on my scalp. Grandma uses a sharp comb and it feels like she’s dividing me in half.”

“I see people two different ways now: people who look like me and people who don’t look like me.”

now who was going to tell me this book is a TOME

“Truth to tell, I was growing old well before my time.”

“I bring the oldest lore. I am she the gods fear.”

“I was the castle built upon that hill, and now the ruin. I am haunted by the ghost of myself.”

“Einsa had few equals in the class when it came to swinging a sword.. some were good, but Sharp was in a league of her own, as if she had found a lover rather than a blade.”

“She had thought that age was just a number, then had seen it as a noose when it tightened around her, and then as something else, a type of surrender that she had never allowed herself.”

“Greater gods than you have run before me. Their temples lie in ruin. Their statues are cast down. Their priests are crucified. Their faithful call my name.”