My Soul to Keep Quotes

“We only waste energy to have horrible fights with the people we love the most.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That’s all life is, on this earth anyway.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“How else, except through being alone for a while, could you ever discover who you really are? But”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“That’s the difference between us and white folks, she told herself. They don’t stop to say “I can’t” or “Should I,” they just do.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Is that your lesson?” she asked him. “I’m sorry to hear that, because you always said just the opposite. Love what you have while you have it, before it’s gone. Isn’t that what you were always trying to tell me?” Her damp eyes glimmered.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“I don’t know about this camping out in the swamplands. That’s for white folks.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Let’s go to sleep, David,” she said in a toneless voice. That night, they slept in the same bed, but their bodies were far apart.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“They dissolved inside each other’s body heat as though they wore their souls on their skin.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Jessica had gone to church all her life, in her frilly pinafores and white gloves, but when she was young it was only another place she had to go. Home, school, church. She didn’t really learn what faith was until after her father died, when she stood on her toes to see what was in the rose-colored casket. She didn’t know what to expect, why she’d been so anxious to take her place in the line at the front of the church, clinging to her mother’s hand. There, inside, was the grim, washed-out face of Daddy. Daddy was going to stay in this box? And they were going to bury this box in the ground? He had to be somewhere else, like her mother kept saying. That wasn’t him at all. On that day, Heaven kept Jessica’s world from caving in. David, somehow, lived without believing in a better place. And yet he could still wake up in the morning and carry out his day and go to sleep without being frozen awake with fears of death, of darkness, of nothing. She didn’t understand how he could do that. She tried, telling herself one night This is all, there is nothing after this, but she felt swallowed by the vast barrenness. She thought of her father’s bones, crumbling to black dust inside that beautiful casket beneath the ground. Maybe David had a point. Religion was a crutch, a way people rationalized away their pain in life, like the slaves yearning for a better existence. A denial. When there is no fear of death, David had told her once, there is no need for religion.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“That’s the difference between us and white folks, she told herself. They don’t stop to say “I can’t” or “Should I,” they just do. And it was a skill, sooner or later, she would need to pick up despite herself. Honor Thy Father and Mother. She liked the sound of it.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“How ironic it was that mortals, who had the least time of all, were willing to waste so much of it away from the people they love.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Religion was a crutch, a way people rationalized away their pain in life, like the slaves yearning for a better existence. A denial. When there is no fear of death, David had told her once, there is no need for religion.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“So there is light but only if you can see past the pain,”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“a remark Khaldun had made once, when Dawit returned from the battlefield against the Italians: What do you gain from it, Dawit? Must a scythe prove itself sharper than a blade of grass? Let grass grow as it will. While”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“When my first wife died long ago, in Ethiopia, I thought I knew grief. But until you have witnessed the death of a loved one to another man’s violence, you know nothing of grief.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“If you believe it, Khaldun had said, I could never convince you otherwise. If you do not, nothing I tell you could sway you. I am the one who should be asking you: Is it the truth? No,”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“They had to work at it, but they found their common ground. Ultimately, though, their differences returned, and she wondered how deeply they ran. How could she continue to overlook them, when they loomed so large? Jessica”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Your strength is the strength of stones. Suddenly,”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep

“Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her “little sister” and would have had potential if he’d remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.”
― Tananarive Due, My Soul to Keep