Like Home Quotes

“Sometimes people smile at you when you walk by, and it makes you feel as if you have money. I can’t explain how, but it just does.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Selling out? Okay, fuck you,” she snaps back. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you! I knew I shouldn’t have told you. You don’t—you don’t get”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Dad wakes up mad early to get to the store, and Mom joins him around an hour later,” she continues. “They work all day, almost every day, and for what? We might own the place, but we don’t live there, so we also pay rent on our house—rent that just won’t stop going up because of who knows why. Bigger chains or newer stores with money buying up property ten feet away from them, or whatever.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Property management companies are hiking up prices, knowing full well that the average income in Ginger East isn’t that high and statistically won’t reach astronomical levels over the next five years. Outside pressure from police to ‘clean out’ the area.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Kate’s sigh transforms into sadness and a vulnerability that I can’t understand. I wasn’t expecting it, and I’m hit so bad when I see it. All of a sudden, all the bitterness at being ignored vanishes because I remember that her family is going through a lot, and I couldn’t possibly understand. I couldn’t possibly. But I do, and I want to understand more. Maybe she forgot, but her family is like my family too.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“know what he means. The street is brighter, the business signs are on straight, and there’s a popular coffee chain at the end of the road. Gourmet coffee? We don’t need that, but it’s still here. And with the shop comes gourmet coffee drinkers who demand cleaner streets, working traffic lights, and safety.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“We don’t want to be portrayed like this is a place where bad stuff always happens, because it isn’t.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Ginger East belongs to both of us. That gnawing feeling of betrayal comes back when I think of how someone could do this to the store. And the thought that Kate could be moving because of it? Even worse.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“The law of internet viral videos states that after a day, everyone should be over it, so I don’t know why I haven’t been replaced with a cat meme or something.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“The normal quiet hum of the street is gone. Instead the air is tense and thick with something foreign. It’s weird. Usually the undesirables, the ugliness of the neighborhood, hide while the kids come out to play. The second we’re at school, the busyness, the good and the bad, starts back up again.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“And now what’s there for you kids to do around here? Drugs, or drinking, or getting pregnant—”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Mom wasn’t born in Nigeria like Dad was. She was born here and lacks the harshness that comes with a village upbringing—the harshness my dad has. She doesn’t speak Igbo like grandma used to, but still, her speech is different and foreign sometimes.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Ginger East is rough; everyone knows that. It’s not the safest for a kid to go out after a certain time, and there are places you should stay away from, even in the daytime.”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home

“Why doesn’t he tell Jake to do it?” I ask. Jake is Kate’s useless older brother who’s gotten away with doing the absolute least because he’s a boy. He’ll straighten one shelf and complain for hours. He outgrew his cool-older-brother phase ages”
― Louisa Onomé, Like Home