The Girls Who Grew Big Quotes

“Here’s the thing about killer whales: contrary to popular belief, they won’t kill you and they’re not even whales. That’s what happens to someone when the world decides something about you, grabs hold and morphs you into an illusion of yourself: suddenly even your name isn’t your own.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“You remember how much safer it is to not want nothing at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong. So if you’re asking me if I think you’d be prettier if you was skinny as a reed, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t much care if you’re skinny or pretty, and don’t you start thinking they’re the same thing, but I sure as hell am always gonna think you prettiest when you’re breathing, when you’re fed and housed and happy.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“If you’re not your mother’s only child, you know there’s not nobody in the world that can understand the dirt you fought to grow from like your brother.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“But that was not how you loved a child. That was how you let a child love you.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“You can add new sand on top of the old sand and you can sew all kinds of new clothes for a child that don’t exist yet and you can find some boy who wants to give you a life that sounds a little more acceptable, but none of that makes the old sand go away.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“And if you think I don’t make sense with all of them just ’cause I’m white, you wouldn’t believe what happens when a girl these days gets knocked up. Suddenly, it’s the most important thing about you. Suddenly, you don’t have green eyes or a two-bedroom shack on Willow Street or straight A’s in Biology. You are nothing but a young mother.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Said this wasn’t no town where you could just be out here mixing with the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people. Funny, I thought. It was the only time in my life I’d ever heard Pawpaw talk about us like we were the right kind of people.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“A pool made you feel invincible, but an ocean did the opposite. It reminded you what a fragile thing you were, how every cell that made you up was nothing in comparison to the waves that could take you down as quickly as a bullet shot through your softest skin.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“We rotate, ripple, revolve, so you can’t know one of us without knowing all of us, love one of us without loving the metal scrape of the truck we found, gave, claimed life inside.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“He apologized, and I was fragile enough to not care whether he meant it.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“It’s funny, making the same mistake twice.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I knew what it was to be our parents’ child.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“But maybe all the things I loved most about my momma were easiest to remember when all I wanted to do was to hug her, when the dream of an intact family was more enchanting than the truth of it all. And I wanted the lie. I wanted the easy story without its cold end.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Don't we all deserve to have a second chance at choosing the thing that'll choose us back.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I like to think of sand like love. The thing that’s true ’bout both of ’em is you only ever see them for what they look like when they’re right in front of you. And isn’t that sorta reckless? To only believe the thing in front of your face, not knowing nothing about where it came from. I loved reckless once. I took what was right in front of me ’cause it looked something like love and I didn’t know different and that’s what gets us sometimes. We think we’re loving when, really, we’re believing. We’re choosing to believe the sand was always white ’cause when we sink our toes into it and the heat surrounds our feet like warm hands, it feels like it can only be God’s hands. That there wasn’t no way it wasn’t created with the earth itself. But real love—love that you see every glimpse of like knocking on the door of a glass room—shows all of itself before it materializes solid. Look close enough and you see your own face, your own hands leathery and creased. Step back and you see the whole world. The quartz tumbling down the mountain to make sand as white and soft as crushed bone.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Unrequited love is like believing in fairies for a little too long, past the age it’s acceptable. Sure, there’s the eventual devastation that this thing you thought was real suddenly evaporated into nothing. But the worst part of it is the shame that you ever believed at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Eyelashes. Get one stuck in the whites of your eye and you’ll feel the phantom of it long after it’s gone. Hope is like that too, I think. Once you feel the spark of it, suddenly it haunts every image and who you was before, what you thought you was okay with, all that breaks open to leave you hunched in a tub surrounded by remnants of who you could’ve been.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“mind was always changing about him, me, us, and I was liable to float into a new world of feeling before I even realized my feet were off the ground.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“some days I thought it’d be better to be some other kind of critter so even if the regret still spiked a hole through me”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I've made mistakes. You don't have to tell me, I already know. But here's the thing: there's not no parent that hasn't stung with the same hand they used to stroke their baby's head with. The difference between a mother who's forgivable and a mother who's not is whether she gives enough of a shit to try to redeem herself in the first place. Apologize and do different. And I would've given anything to be better for them.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big: A Novel

“Truth is”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Boys was so single-minded”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Stop running from being alone, Emory. Sometimes alone is the best place to be.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I’d expected it to be something scary like Bull or maybe Tyrone.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“If my life as I knew it was ending, In some ways had already ended, that that meant I needed to decide how I buried myself. Hold a funeral for what could been me and then decide what my afterlife would look like. I wanted to be buried deep, somewhere where the sand was mixed with emerald and my corpse would be colored green. I wanted an afterlife among the ocean, not washed up and half eaten by birds.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Motherhood made you believe blindly, hope endlessly, behave irrationally, as long as it meant those children tucked safely in the pocket of your love.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“For some of us, the terror is in the waiting. For others, it is in the dispossession of our own skin, how we turn raw and violet and breathless, our flesh gone translucent. We see the child that is growing inside us and we are not sure if we have enough in us to love it, to raise it. This foreign thing, this creature that has altered the axle of ourselves.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“But now? I want different now. You can't predict what's gonna happen, but you can take a good look at yourself and be honest about who you are and what you're willing to give for what you want.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big