Big Girl Quotes

“You try so hard to keep everything together. This is what it is to be a woman. Everything is your job. Your job is everything: to be attractive, successful, raise smart, healthy children who are ready for life. To be available to everything. To be everything. And you work hard at it, at everything, at doing all this everything right. And in the back of your mind you’re holding your breath and waiting for someone to hand you a prize. Something that says, You did a good job—You did good at everything— and Someone appreciates it. If you’re lucky, you get little flashes here and there: a promotion at work, or someone notices you lost a few pounds. But you always hope for that one person who will look at you and see all the everything you do, and applaud.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“I know they're not like that now. If you asked me what happened between them," she said finally, "I don't know if I could tell you. But of course, nobody asked me." Her voice dropped low now, and she turned to look for the bus. "Your mother and father are both dreamers," she said, her back still turned. "That's what brought them together, and that's what's tearing them down. You'll always have to wake up at some point. And if you not ready for woke-up love, it'll break your heart.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“Like most adolescents, she was reluctant to admit the tender truths of her life, constantly concerned that her secrets were somehow both more salacious and more pitiful than those of her peers.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“I think happiness comes in pieces, My Ly-Ly. Money, looks, a quiet mind that don’t ask too many questions. Power. All those are pieces of what it takes to be happy. No exact science to it, but some things are just true: women are handed fewer pieces of happiness and pay more for ’em. Black women, that goes double. If you’re fat, then double that again. You take a fat black woman with a smart mouth, strange habits, and no sense of shame, and she doesn’t stand a chance, I can tell you.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“Men’s attention and approval were borrowed gifts she was no longer sure she wanted.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“The everything of womanhood carries no reward at all. And yet, everything still has to get done. So you keep working and you stop waiting, but the hope is still there, tucked in a corner. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going—the hope that that someone—that one person—will applaud.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“Young people think love is mathematics. They think if you add it up and add it up and keep adding, you can save it until you’re ready to cash it in. But it doesn’t work that way. You might be making the deposits, but your whole life cashes the checks. Work, children, bills—it all takes its cut. Then you go back to love, thinking it’ll be there, and sometimes it’s not.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“She wondered how much of life would feel this way—shock without the grace of surprise.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“While he told his stories, Malaya tried to turn herself on for him, to spark herself to life as she had for RayShawn. Prettiness was the price of attention, and for fat girls, prettiness alone was not enough—one had to shine with a confidence so complete it looked like desire.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“As she drifted back up to Harlem alone on the bus, she did not think about what RayShawn had said, how he had looked, what she had felt. She erased the details from her memory as the streets scrolled by beyond the window. Block by block, she planned a translation of herself.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“Each time someone told her, “You have such a pretty face,” she felt as though they wanted to sever her head from her body, to discard the meat of her and leave the small round disk of her face as her one saving quality. She was supposed to be grateful for his attention”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“A great business of body and heart seemed to join these women, and only a few questions separated them: Did each understand the rules of womanhood? Did she try to follow them? How hard did she try, and what did it cost her?”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“MALAYA ENJOYED a good mystery. It wasn’t the triumph of solving that compelled her. It was the sifting through—the discovering of new layers and textures, unthought-of twists and turns that thrilled her. One of the greatest mysteries in her life was her mother.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“when a man can’t be proud of himself, he looks to the woman. If she’s not something to be proud of, she’ll pay double for both of them. I learned that the hard way.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“You can be the smartest, most beautiful woman in the world,” Nyela said, “but if you can’t control your weight, you won’t be happy.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“There was something insistently unexpected in hip-hop, and it entitled Malaya to become unexpected, too. It meant she could be angry and tender, sad and hopeful, a black girl besotted, full of feeling, wearing lipstick and big men’s clothes.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl

“Well, you know, trying’s a trap. It’s the doing makes the donkey drive.”
― Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl