Favourite Quotes from the Last Five Books I Read

“The way they were – a braid of brilliance and bravado – concerned everyone.”

“There’s a feel in the air. A stickiness like walking through an invisible syrup. A thickness to life.”

“Jasmine Jordon said this like she said most things – with her whole body. Like the words weren’t just coming out of her mouth but were also rolling down her spine.”

“I was no one’s sacrifice. Not then. Not now. Not ever.”

“There are some things that can’t be changed with words. Some things have to be seen. They have to be felt.”

“I leaned back, studying her as she finished my bun. A bit of icing covered her lip. Her nose was still red from the cold, her hair wild and windblown. My little heathen.”

“Idiocy is oft mistaken for sentimentality.”

“Boys like us never really got away, it seemed. We just bought ourselves time. A few more gasps of air, a few more poems, a few more years. History hurt more than any weapon inflicted on us. It hit back harder than any weapon we could wield, any weapon we could ourselves turn into.”

“Just as some cultures have hundred words for ‘snow’, there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lay awake at night.”

When I looked up, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, almost pleadingly–as if I’d led someone afraid of heights to the edge of a rusting bridge. And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could                                                              be her son again.

“Class started, and I slipped across the days as if they were an ice rink, reaching out for strangers to keep my balance.”

“Dishonesty, she felt, was a spectrum; you might be on the less dangerous end, but you were still on it, prone to slip up, slide further along, depending on the circumstances.”

“When we left the room, a few hours later, it was like emerging into the daylight after an afternoon trip to the cinema, leaving behind the mythical for reality, the feeling of being quietly but fundamentally changed.”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.”

“The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.”

“The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself…all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough.”