The Wilderness Quotes

“What am I doing with my life? In the American sense, the bootstrapping capitalist one, her life as-is seemed a good answer. She was a relatively successful business owner, she employed young people, she brought good, wholesome food to the hood. During the pandemic, she had managed to keep her entire full-time staff on payroll, even through the early months when the restaurant was closed and only she and a skeleton crew fulfilled delivery orders. Sure. And yet. So many, too many people had nothing. What was the point of working hard, having something, when one had to live with the knowledge of so much want?”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“How embarrassing. To suddenly understand how much of a burden you are to another person, how much someone else might wish to be free of you.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“...If you're going to be alone, you have the right to secrets. A right not to explain yourself, not even to yourself.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“She isn't herself with him, not exactly. She is an idea that formed between the moment of meeting him at that club and arriving at his door that first time. A slick-with-sweat, high-shine version of herself who needs less of everything. Less conversation, less attention, less time.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Guilt gripped her--she was the person who determined Reina's salary, which in turn determined these conditions. But she remembered that Reina sent the bulk of her money back home to her parents. She would be able to afford a better place otherwise, surely. It was a kind of sacrifice that Nakia never had cause to make. She hoped she would be willing if circumstances called for it. Why was life so hard for some people? A question people called you stupid for asking, yet no one could give you a straightforward explanation.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“He's new in town, just finished his med school residency in Ohio. Now's your moment if you want it."

Desiree didn't respond. She grabbed Monique's hand to fake salsa to "Suavemente." These people always found a way to sneak in what somebody did for a living, she thought. They walked around with their résumés in their mouths.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Desiree, Snoop Dogg fan since elementary school, had known for a long time that it was possible to limn the line between enthusiasm for form and endorsement of content. One did this every day, for various reasons. "It's an essential, tragic part of being a Black woman in America," Monique might have said. Most things were objectionable if you looked at them up close.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Build up her own life--how? How to build a life with no one, rooted to nothing but a house full of an old man's things? Desiree began devoting weekday mornings to scouring the internet for jobs. She learned what she had no interest in--hospitality, teaching, medicine--but what she might apply herself to remained as much a mystery as before Nolan died.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“The rest of the day, while she ate, worked on a website, texted the girls, or talked to her mother, the particular assortment of characters she'd published online would play on a loop in her brain. It was no way to live, she knew. She was here, on this stool in this coffee shop, but always in conversation with a bunch of people elsewhere, some of them very likely not human beings.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“A cliché is a cliché because it is common.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“It is our job as friends to figure out how to be there for the people we love, come what may.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Absolve, dissolve, and resolve,”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“If you want to reverse course”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“I am on cocaine. Of course I’m awake.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“nipping at society’s collective heels. Atrocities, natural catastrophes, the dissolution of common decency. Always something new to hate, someone who deserved derision and ostracism. Always somebody murdered, somebody murdered, somebody murdered. Their gone-too-soon faces everywhere, overly familiar. No way to live at all.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“there were nights she felt like every edifice she’d propped up to separate her from the elements, the wind-blasted outside of aloneness, could crumble, and she’d have nothing but her own uncovered self to brace against it. It might not take much for her to end up in the wilderness once again.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Much too young to be left to figure things out for herself without a few good nudges. Why hadn’t they nudged?”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“My granddaughter here”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Being estranged from someone you loved turned out to be a grief that came in waves. Loss was loss was loss.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“The guilt of not showing up when I should have has led me to sense offense when none was intended, to assume resentment lingered in them the way shame did in me.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“It was Conrad’s family history, yet Nakia’s mother Juanita, daughter of an electrician, took special pride in relaying it. Nakia, on the other hand, tended to tell only her closest friends that she came from free people. Not free from jump—who but a handful could claim that on this continent?—but free for a good, long while.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness