Handsome Vanilla Quotes

“I'm dead if I'm not wired
Crucified if not proclaimed
Cut off if not in contact
Devoid of soul if not ashamed
Terminal if not content
Last in line if not number one
Sorrowful if not elated
All is lost if all's not won
Eternal tipping of the scales
They fail to balance out
Doomed to drown in rushing floods
Or perish in a drought”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“No, you're not numb. In fact, you are quite the opposite. You feel things so extraordinarily with the very power of your imagination that by the time they occur in real life, the tangible event simply cannot compare to the feeling you made with your mind.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“The locker room is so quiet around them. Older girl walks away and Amber has to slowly continue changing her clothes and try not to shake from a more potent blend of confusion and embarrassment than I had yet experienced or imagined or knew to fear.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“One great thing about the course of life is that there will be a multitude of times when you'll think to yourself, "I wish everything could be just like this, all the time."
And you'll think it more than once.
And you'll mean it more each time.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I tell ya, the live ones put more death in the place than the dying. In the time I was there. I watched my grandma try to tell the same story three times to two nurses and one doctor and she was told to stop talking each time. She'd barely get two sentences out before they'd shush her. She's dying. Silence won't save her, let her talk.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“It was important for me to understand that I was only a very small part of her picture. She was a person before she was my grandmother, and that was something I had never precisely considered.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I'm overwhelmed with that powerful blend of confusion and withering embarrassment that leaves a person motionless and forces a brain to move forward as if it hadn't witnessed the incident that fashioned the feeling.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“This is why I'm against marrying young. When you're young, you marry your holes and burrow into them like a childhood bed, until you realize that you've outgrown the bed, and then it's, you know, the hassle of wanting a new bed, of looking for a new bed, of getting a new bed, assembling the bed, adjusting to the bed.
I don't want to be reminded of my childhood bed.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I know I will never be alone. The baby will make me a god. When I am a god, I can create whatever I want.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“We're told there does a world exist
Spinning beyond our roof
We slept outside again last night
We're looking for the proof”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Again the news crawl of Meg's words made its way across the designated space in his head. This time, size 14 font, white lettering on a black background, the first letter of each word capitalized: This Divide Between Us Is Made Up Of Things That You Haven't Done. The Problem I Have Is With The Things That You Don't Do.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He rolled his window back up and turned off the radio, thinking about all the other possible lives that he would never be challenged to live.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“His tone had been regretfully similar to a man's he had never met, but who remained ingrained in him as an example of what to never become.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Nibiru, are you around here? Come." Sometimes, he envisioned spoken words in his head as though they were printed in the air and he saw this word - come - all lower case letters in size 9 font. No exclamation point, perhaps two of those wavy dashes on either side, signifying impotence. He was too ashamed to shout without company, nobody there to give him permission to disturb the night's peace, nobody to cushion the blow of odd glances if a person saw him and thought his actions peculiar.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“If you're reading this, then this book is for you. If not, well then, this book is for me.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“And I said, "See, this is passion"
You beamed and glowed
And it was at me
But it was not for me
I wilted and you were the live one
And as quickly as it came, it left
And we both slumped
And the little life left in me wanted to go
And I spoke to that part
Take that little life and leave
It can be bigger again
But you asked me to stay
Saying Help Me over and over
And just like you knew
I would want to talk about wounded birds
You always knew that I always wanted to help
So I killed myself and I stayed
And we were casualties together
Finally connected.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I was fawning
I think I thought you were fawning
There was life around everything we touched
Most of me was very alive
And I think I thought you wanted to be”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“You knew I was alive
That's why you talked to me about wounded birds
You knew I would talk about wounded birds
I didn't know you were a wounded bird”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“When I fell, I instantly had my "Oh, That's Why" realization and I would have known not to rollerskate through the house again, even if I had been alone. There is a loss of dignity that a child experiences when they've just suffered the consequences of something they were warned against by the Wiser One while the Wiser One gloats for being wiser, especially when the gloating is packaged as anger. But I was too young to examine gloating or anger or wisdom and she, the mother of a timid child who rarely got hurt, had not had many opportunities to consider the vulnerable state of an injured kid. We were both green and hurt and scared in this new way, together.
As an adult, it helps me to view my mom as a singular woman beyond her role in my life, but also, as a child herself who does not, in fact, possess knowledge of all things. Our mother-daughter relationship was this huge, life-altering thing that we are both experiencing for the first time, at the same rate and we don't have answers, we only have things that we're trying out. This was true for my grandmother too; she was learning to be alive for the first time.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Maybe if she would have written things down in a notebook; details smaller than her life. Maybe if she would have turned them into a song. Maybe if she had a picture. These are the ways to remember things that your mind doesn't on its own commit. However it chooses what it does to commit. However.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“She wanted to stay in, yet she wanted to devour the world. But not devour it in the way that many people use the word devour, in which something disappears inside of you, is used momentarily to fuel an interaction in which you want to impress another person who is also waiting to use something they have recently devoured on you, making room for more in and out, but in a way that it would stay inside her forever. How does one put something inside of them forever?”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“In an instant, she was free from this small commitment and any kind of freedom feels good. She much preferred that invites came faceless this way, so she could say No without saying anything at all. A voice without a voice; what a rare, modern treat. The world made it easier all the time for her to feel connected, but alone, and therefore free.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“So this is my fate
I am doomed to remain
In this place that my crooked heart led
I won't be fooled again
From now on I know
Wisdom means to follow my head”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“There may very well have been a tennis player named Dennis whose only reason for playing tennis was for the thrill of the rhyme. There may have even been two Tennis Dennises. In fact, with billions and billions of people, 200,000 years, give or take the years before tennis was a sport, there may have even been three.
You might find that thinking this way expands your freedom, your consideration of your own capability, the spectrum of what all people can be, and can do.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“...without thinking the follow-up thought that prevents a person from following through with the original, she throws the tea in the mug at the screen and watches it drip down, while now, finally, allowing the follow-up thought to come through, the thought that would have stopped her from throwing the tea at the screen in the first place. She feels two things: recognizable regret and dim, unfamiliar power.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“A good thing to do is to think about what people have done. Not only people that you've read about in books or seen on the news or heard mentioned in deliberate conversation, and not only deeds that are noteworthy. It's good to think about all the possibilities of what people have probably done. The scope of what's possible, statistical probabilities of unique behavior and unusual action in the 200,000 years that people have existed because there are more than 7 billion of us alive right now and that's not including the number of people who have ever lived. Within those numbers exist captivating, eccentric, strange, fanciful variation, when you consider what people have probably done. Like, every time you've had an impulse that you've held back, imagine that there has been a person who has had that same impulse and gone through with it, because there probably has been. Imagine any type of person and any type of story having happened because when you do that, it feels like you're creating, but you're probably not. Imagine, considering the magnitude of these numbers and the variables within each human being, that all possibilities have occurred. If physical anomalies like twins born with bodies totally fused together resembling two-headed, eight limbed, human spiders, or a man born with a shrunken female head affixed to the back of his own head, which was animated without being consciously controlled by him, then imagine that anything you can imagine has occurred. However typical or atypical, these things you're imagining have happened. These people you're thinking of have been.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He taught me the mark of a Grand Gesture - that it wouldn't be missed if it weren't done. A Grand Gesture lives in the mind of the giver and is never even a consideration in the mind of the gifted.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Nothing is free now that we're all adults.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“My stomach is in instant pain and I feel that terrible adrenaline again. I hate the crowd even more than the fighters and I see myself learning that proximity to pain is a particular pain of its own.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“She asks me if I'm new. I feel how badly the question "Are you new?" stings when you're not new.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla