Unburnable Quotes

“His soul,' she would say, 'picked mine up and we flew.' And to those who gave her a disbelieving look, she would insist. 'Have you never touched someone and felt them? Felt what was inside of their body?' Only a few would know what she was talking about.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable

“Why would you want to go look for that wicked girl?” she asked. “Because I never thanked her,” Lillian said, but she was really hoping for forgiveness.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“And then Matilda answered her own question because the truth was that Mary-Alice had no idea. “If a man is going to abandon a woman, he will do it for other reasons. He will not abandon her because he gets married.” Mary-Alice”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“The more important the event, the more elaborate the costume. Of course God could not care less what she wore, or who baptized the child. But God was not Catholic; Icilma was. The baptism would have to be done in full regalia. She”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“He had been, he thought, her friend, when in fact he had always been her entire world. Inside”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“And there would be nowhere else for them to go with their conversation after that except to the bedroom,”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“That’s why they can’t get ahead. Wouldn’t look for work, just living like they still slaves. Sitting down on they backside talking ’bout slavery, slavery. Everything for them is slavery and white man fault. Blaming slavery when is they own laziness causing they problems, with they no-ambition selves. Still taking what massa give them and calling it welfare.” Margaret”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“We don’t have anything like that here. War masks and so on.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“The people who were downstairs drinking ran upstairs for a better view of the upcoming fight.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“The power of a confession is such that judges and juries will take the word of the accused as gospel—even in the face of evidence that clearly proves that they are lying.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“He was so intent on running away from the specter of his parents’ life that he had never stopped to properly consider what he should have been running toward. Teddy”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“But Iris was not crazy, not yet, not then. She simply did not have a frame of reference to understand the meaning of her skin in a society of people who defined themselves in an ascending rank according to the shades that led up to white. She did not understand the meaning of her poverty, nor her resulting place on the bottom rung of the social ladder. Later on, when she finally understood, she was still never able to determine which one of the three—color, class, or poverty—was responsible for the inescapability of her destiny. To her mind, when she still had it, each was an equal part of the same whole.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“Some might have said that he was color-struck, but color had nothing to do with it, it was all about where he had come from and where he wanted to go—it had been all about the climb.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“And Iris was far too beautiful to escape the appetite of the men—or the expectation of the women, seeking respite from that most tedious and taxing of their household duties.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“Icilma always noted that their poverty never ran so deep as to prevent them from beautifying their surroundings:”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“He repeated his question. “Your love life?” “Same old, you know. Nothing out there. All the good men are gay.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“She learned yet another critical fact, which is that those male animals have the good sense to interfere only with females in heat, but that men lack the sexual intelligence or instinct to leave their disinterested women alone.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“That was just the means by which he would be totally and constantly surrounded by Black people; and it was the means by which they would all know his name.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“It wasn’t enough for Teddy to know that his family could not be counted in the statistics of poverty—among those who did not rely on government subsidies of any kind: they went to work; they owned their own home; their sons did not go to jail; their daughters got married before they got pregnant; there were few drug addicts and alcoholics among them—and those who succumbed did so in the privacy of their homes and not on the street disgracing everybody.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“And in spite of all the killing they did in his name, they said he was a good God, a God of Love.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“He could have a twenty-minute discussion with a semiliterate horticulturalist who spoke a dialect so thick it could not be called English, but he couldn’t start a conversation with Lillian about love. Instead, he offered only this: “Barbuda’s got pink sand, and seventeen miles of unbroken beach.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“She treated her patients with medicine and she treated them with prayer and sacrifice and ritual, because for her there could be no clear separation of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable: A Haunting Caribbean Novel of Family Scandal and a Daughter's Journey to Healing

“One should never blame gods, he believed, for the use to which human beings put them.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable