The Turner House Quotes

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Here is the truth about self-discovery: it is never without cost.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The words settled on her shoulders like a curse, and one thing was clear: there was no one to save her but her.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Everybody else cain't be wrong all the time. Sometimes it's gotta be you.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by an ruin her.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“There ain't no haints in Detroit.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Where do the homeless make toast?”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“You're worried about her forgiving you...but you need to be worrying about why you're acting up in the first place.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“It was frustrating, the way this siblings worshipped their parents. What part of their worlds would crumble if they took a good look at their parents' flaws? If there was no trauma, why not talk about the everyday, human elements of their upbringing? Call a spade a spade.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The same quality that read as dependable and even-keeled in his youth had crusted over and become stubborn and pitiable.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“That was how he existed in their lives: suddenly there, on his own time,”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“She was here and already in the future looking back at here. Editing, perfecting, reliving it.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“She wanted to say something about how when you have a child it changes the way you feel when you’re alone, how you are never alone in the same way again because there is a live, independently thinking part of you out in the world that you can never fully push out of your awareness, even if you try.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“There was a difference between violent, destructive crimes and bending rules that were prejudiced or predatory to start.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Insomnia was its own kind of haunting.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“I don't just sit around hopin for nothing. I do shit. It's the 'hope' part that fucks that line all up. You should change it to somethin like, 'We fight for better things,' or 'We work for better things.' Or 'We plan for better things.' That's what's wrong with this city; it ain't about the mayor. Too many people busy hoping shit will get better to actually figure out a way to make shit better.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of "Ask and you shall receive." This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha's prayers were a series of thank-yous and I'm sorrys.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least. “I’m”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Says you and your family. Sooner or later you’re gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn’t mean it is. Not at all.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“You got a child to feed and a life to get on with.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“but Cha-Cha thought the word was too clinical to truly convey the sort of secret, sad drinker Francis was. He took no joy in his drinking. It was as if he drank to punish himself for some misdeed.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“... too decisive a step among a family of people who talked about improving their health but generally left the things that ailed their bodies and their minds unattended.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Everybody else cain’t be wrong all the time. Sometimes it’s gotta be you.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“There was nowhere to put all of that self-loathing, no one place to stash the regret, but stillness, if it would just show up, could hold despair at bay.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Either she stopped calling the men or they her, the mutual interest petering out like the last few seconds of a song.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“The truth, when finally revealed, is sticky like wet dough. The majority of it stays in place as one handles it, but pieces break off and adhere, making certain facts seem larger, more portentous, than others.”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

“Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, 1918–1967”
― Angela Flournoy, The Turner House