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

“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

“You remember how much safer it is to not want nothing at all.”
― 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

“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

“I knew what I felt wasn’t distinctly human, but 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, I prob’ly wouldn’t remember it an hour later. Like those rats in the maze when their little brains blessed them with forgetting.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“But that was before I told anybody, before I started to feel suffocated beneath a love I couldn’t return.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Noni understood I wasn’t going to confess to her, seemed to respect that and headed back toward the stairs, but before she climbed them, she turned to me and said, “I’m not embarrassed of you, Adela. For the longest time, I thought you and your daddy was embarrassed of me. Still do.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“The Girls knew how to run wild and, at first, I, like most of this town, feared them. Children mothering children and never apologizing for it, the country’s shame clear as the gloss of the babies’ eyes staring up as they suckled on their mothers’ breasts. I feared the Girls until the day I realized I was becoming one of them, that every week my skin was stretching me closer to the way they let loose. The pregnancy showed itself eventually and the Girls rubbed off on me like sand on wet feet, so I could not be rid of them.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“This is how all family’s created. Confession. A yearning to release. Somewhere to place your shame and have it wrapped up, coddled, cradled like an infant who don’t have words yet to explain all the ways the world haunts them.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“All these old folks only cared about race, but not me. I cared about people and animals and things more innate than color. It was primitive, seeing things all black and white. I prided myself on being evolved.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Not every girl could say that and for a moment all my worries became masked with the jitters of a simmering desire and the hope that I could have what every girl wanted: someone to love her, protect her, clean her vomit out of the pool and not make her feel bad about it for even a moment.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“a love that began and ended the way oceans did: nowhere and everywhere, a thrashing constant.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Smart girls aren’t supposed to get in trouble.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I was supposed to be golden.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big