The Mothers Quotes

“Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. —”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman’s life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“No shame in loving an ain’t-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain’t-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him. Yes,”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“She'd already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more. —”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Soft things can take a beating. But you push somethin’ hard a little bit and it shatters. You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don’t last.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn't exist.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“You used to be able to spot an ain't-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain't-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas' basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who's willing and if she gets in trouble - well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next.

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain't shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It's exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.

Yes, those are the ones we worry about.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers