The Wilderness Quotes

“heavy, too much blue and gray in the décor. The kind”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“She was forty-six years old. He could do nothing to ease her loneliness, that kernel of isolation that had been part of her so long it was like a prosthetic fused to her body. She'd grown a life around it, and at this point maybe it was naïve to spend time imagining a life without it.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“This country has little issue with using our money to pay for the silence of those of us whose lives it ruins.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“The unvarnished horrors of modern warfare were on everyone's social media feeds now, had been for months, and the truly bleak thing was that there seemed to be just as many people outraged by the carnage as onlookers cheering it on. The more powerful a person was--a politician, a celebrity, or even just a person who made a good living online--the more they seemed fine with or were determined to be silent about the preventable misery of others, whether they be Palestinian, Sudanese, Congolese, or Haitian.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Nakia had come across Conrad and Juanita's box of Obama family memorabilia--novelty plates, buttons, their tickets to the first inauguration--when she helped them to pack up to move back to New Jersey. A time capsule of wild hope, almost painful to look back on now.

"We really thought that man was gonna be the Black Messiah or something," she said. "What a time."

"Yeah, turns out he was very much not," January said. "And white people ain't been okay since. Look at them.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“There is no over the hill,
just a series of small hillocks, plotted out before me,
each one I pray
not to die climbing.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“I just been thinking about that word, you know. Verbatim. Verbatim. Like you are what you say you are verbatim, right? It's a deep-ass word."

She nodded, no idea whatsoever what he meant.

"And it's not just what you say. What you do verbatim is who you are too, right?”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“Her impulse to want less was born of her own early disappointments, sure, but life would inevitably disappoint everyone, she thought. Better to figure out what exactly was worth getting your arms around and hold tight to that, and anything else good that fell into your lap could be a happy bonus.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“See, this is why it's hard to be real with you. You never really want anything. You don't know what it's like to feel like you're supposed to be having a certain kind of life and you're just not doing it.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“The problem of debasement caused by men. Just how they moved through the world, free and presumptuous. Just how the most they thought to do was always not enough, a task completed never as valuable as true foresight, true initiative.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“It's just that some of the people I've met through her, the athletes, the influencers and writers? They all have this same self-righteousness, like this assumption that what they're doing is more valuable than anyone else's work, but they don't do anything if they're not the marquee name, if it doesn't further their brand in some way. They're fucking hollow inside. I don't know, it makes my skin crawl. And it doesn't help that they all happen to be rich.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

“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