Nightcrawling Quotes

“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“The idea of drowning doesn’t bother me, though, since we’re made of water anyway. It’s kind of like your body overflowing with itself.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We’re always trying to own men we don’t got no control of.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We always showing people our hands like it's proof we're human.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“am still waiting to be hit by some universe-halting love that will turn me inside out and remove all the rotting parts of me.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was the more real?”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“We're all wanting something, though; most of us replacing what we really want with skin, which works until you wake up and the mirror is a blur of time twisting around the throat.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“He's here, sunshine probably blistering the back of his neck, staring at me, hoping for anything different than what I've always given him. He doesn't deserve fractions and that's all I got, all I'm willing to give.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“That boy is a wonder. He's my autumn rain, my last picture of the sun before it sets. Daytime is not possible without Trevor. Not even sure the sun come out without Trevor.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I wonder if they’ll ever chant about the women too, and not just the ones murdered, but the particular brutality of a gun barrel to a head. The women with no edges laid, with matted hair and drooping eyes and no one filming to say it happened, only a mouth and some scars.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Daddy always said fuck the cops, but don’t fuck with them, unless you got a reason.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty. The café lady sticks the pen behind her ear where her undercut fades from blue to hot pink and then blond, and she smiles the same way that the mean girls used to smile before they said I couldn’t sit at their table in elementary school, like she’s waiting for a punch or some kind of prize.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I think 190 might have a moon in place of his heart: waxing and waning, trying to decide if it is whole.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“She tears her eyes away from the road for a moment to glance at me. “If you did something wrong, then so did Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem and every other woman who did what she had to do even when it wasn’t respected.” She coughs. “I’m”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I need her to tell me mamas can change, that there is hope for Trevor, for Marcus, for me.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun's out.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Death is easier to live through unseen.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“The swarm of her voice is closing in on me, like poison dripping out her mouth, and she can't seem to ever look at me and tell me what I need to hear.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“She is a woman who survives, even if that survival means tricking herself into believing this world is something it is not, that her life is all glory.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“When there is no choice, the only thing you have left to do is walk.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“The sky takes each flurry and sends it right back with just a hint of music lingering in the echo, a belt from some invisible trombone, the lowest note on an organ drawn out. Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out of my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“There are no words, barely any sounds from either of us, but the car is talking. It squeaks and rumbles, like it is coming alive in the face of our bodies and I almost wish it would begin to drive itself, take me to the top of the hills and let me see the bay spread out farther than my eyes will ever be able to travel.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“I think this is the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figure out how to grow in California’s eternal drought. Existing as the most salient and invisible thing on the road, both sinking into the dark and so terribly misplaced.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

“Just because you ain’t his mama don’t mean you ain’t given him something can’t nobody take away.”
― Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling