Family Lore Quotes

“The Divine does not live in fear, and the godly lives in each of us. This is one journey, and beyond this there is another. There is no veil between this world and that one. They are the same world, the one before, this one, the one that comes next, a string of pearls, ends tied so tightly you cannot feel the knot that binds.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“How do lineages of women from colonized places, where emphasis is put on silent enduring, learn when and where to confide in their own family if forbearance is the only attitude elevated and modeled?)”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“The alone time was a blessing.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Oh, I may not know much about living my own life, but I'm smart for others. And I know the heart is a burial ground for memories that shame and hurt.
You can visit and place flowers there and make it a tomb. Or let those things act as fertilizer and pay no homage. p. 351”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“You’re with a man who has never appreciated the everything of a wonderful woman. It is beyond him.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Maybe my relationship with pornography was complicated, but I wouldn’t let Jeremiah or anyone make it uglier than it felt in the moments it didn’t feel good.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“My anxiety has medication, so go tell your anxiety to fuck itself. Because, I fuck who I want.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“I smiled back at her. Neither one of us looked the same. We looked like the thicker, gray-streaked, slightly less lost versions of ourselves we now were.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“mother’s magic, like all of the magic for those of us who have a hint of uncanniness, is not like White people’s magic in the movies—led by ritual, called upon, granted in a ceremony of smoke and candelabras. It is not an orderly system like how fantasy novels can describe the exact structure of where and whence and thusly.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“It’s silly to have a nickname for a nickname, but we’d always loved taking apart each other’s names and seeing how else we could arrange the letters into love.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“But for the first time, she admitted to herself that she was scared to leave the cacophony of her family’s laughter and bickering and the sunlight and moonshine and enveloping darkness of closing her eyes, and the bright green of the first new leaves in the spring, and the pure white of a first snow before her shoe left its imprint, and the big wonder and warmth of love love love love and yet, we must.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“If one must answer a call from Pastora, apprehension was advised; her mouth had never known silk.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“not respond. Camila and Flor exchanged”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“They acted like their tongues were taken out to be sharpened daily, but rarely to slice a sliver of the hides of their husbands.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“It amazes me how few questions I know to ask, or whom to ask them of, until it’s already too late for the answers to be useful. How do lineages of women from colonized places, where emphasis is put on silent enduring, learn when and where to confide in their own family if forbearance is the only attitude elevated and modeled?)”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“ONA: Flor’s daughter, possessing a magical alpha vagina, b. 1988”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Slighted things needed you to witness the wound you gave them. p. 300”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Yadi opined that even if Tía Mati walked in on the man having a threesome with his newly pregnant girlfriend, cameras on as they live streamed to OnlyFans, Tía still might not know how to leave.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“I don’t want it like this. And it’s been happening since you were cleared to try. It’s starting to feel transactional. I’m not a fucking stud horse.” “Oh,”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“I wanted to give him a laundry list of the symptoms I’d felt in my body that day: a cramp in my right side, tender breasts, and high irritability. I might be ovulating right this moment, and I didn’t have time for an argument. We didn’t.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“their”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“She’d rented the hottest nightclub in the Bronx for her fiftieth birthday. Her English was more proficient than all her siblings’, and she made use of it in her approximation of a Dominican-York socialite.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“On the night they were married, Mamá. And now, six months later, he hasn’t gotten whatever that illness is out of his system. Such little respect he’s had for her.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Says the girl who never met a past boo she wanted to leave in the past. Every one of your breakups lasted a hundred years.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“The conversations with her siblings and daughter felt fraught with the questions of life and death. She hadn’t meant to mine everyone else’s life experiences. She’d only meant to make room for her own.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Mainly because she knew it took steady hands to keep a dream afloat, and while Yadi’s hands were inspired, they also trembled.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Gladly. And El Pico Duarte is in the other direction.” She pointed with her lips. “You could still be a good person, Santana. It isn’t too late. Even if you are a compulsive, manipulative liar.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“were eating, nutritiously so; it meant the family supplied several portions of meat for those boys to delight in.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Yadi once caught her like that, chewing the cartilage of a chicken bone, the smooth ivory picked clean. It’s one of the memories Yadi liked to use when she told people why she’d become plant-based: her mother, standing over a plate that was not her own, addicted to meat to the point that she had reduced herself to scavenging”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“Pastora had murmured that she would talk to her daughter, but in reality, she was struggling to approach this wake with as flippant an attitude as Flor seemed to have.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore