Lakewood

I think men can be absolutely useless and a lot of people will find a way to say something nice about them. Especially white men. But a woman has to be something. If she’s not, you know, considered hot or the right amount of smart or good at cooking, people don’t see her. And if she’s too much of something, then many people hate her.

Sometimes, dreams are not omens. They’re just your brain stitching things together.

I am a thousand percent sure there are plenty of white women who think America is great to them. But America is only routinely good to women, especially black women, when it wants something from them.

People feel more loyalty to how they think things should be than to other people, including their family.

If you think too much about how things should be, you forget how they are

I decided that I will go there every day. Drink from the same fountain I remember my grandmother's hands lifting me up toward. Have a cup of coffee in the coffeeshop and watch the water spill up and out of the fountain. I will look at the brushstrokes, the sculptures gleaming under the light like well-tempered chocolates, the golden frames, black and white images of the long dead. I will force myself to remember, despite everything I know now, people are capable of making something wonderful.

But her grandmother had surprised her. She had spoken about saving yourself, not for marriage- although that would be great and really what Jesus preferred- but for someone who respected your body as much as you did. Her grandmother had said it was better to love your body as much as possible before letting someone else have access to it. That they could permanently damage in unexpected ways how you saw yourself.

People want to believe these research studies are about something simple that they can relate to like winning a contest. They don’t want to think about why a government would want to experiment on its citizens. They do it because they can, I said. Because you don’t see us as people.

That path was filled with the thorns and snakes and loose gravel of life’s deep unfairness.

Deziree said there were good and bad people of all races. And really, maybe you shouldn’t trust anybody completely until they proved they were going to treat you right.

The closest I can come to describing how I felt at that moment was I was sentient champagne. I loved the feeling of being exposed to the air, fizzing over my bottle’s edge.

it’s the only way we can talk about the consequences of the past without feeling responsible for our present actions.

The only dependable way to survive today is to put your faith in the power of other people wanting to give you money. Online fundraising. Corporations that still pretend to care what consumers think. They want to be able to say, See, look how benevolent we are, think about this instead of how we’re polluting the ocean and not paying our workers enough.

She suddenly understood the thought experiments better based on this feeling, the uncanniness of someone you love being able to abruptly articulate a single feeling. Friendship, family, and romance breed a telepathy that comes from kinship.

There are times in your life, Lena knew, where to think actively about what was happening in the moment, what had recently happened, would shatter everything.

I’ve been wishing things could be different. Having faith would mean I truly believe I could see her again.

They wanted to think their way of being black was better than her way of being black. While that’s not racist, she thought it was tied into it.

But America is only routinely good to women, especially black women, when it wants something from them.

Even when they weren’t online, people spoke as if they were bots designed to get clicks. Phrases repeated to get a person’s attention, with nothing substantial beneath them.

Everywhere taught me to think about things in the simplest ways. School told me that anything could be summed up and have conclusions drawn from it in five paragraphs. This = good. That = bad. But now I think a lot about context. I think about what I owe the people in my life and what I owe people I will never see, never speak to.

Kelly's eyes were dark and his eyelashes were so long, it was rude.

The day before she'd died, the three of them were in the hospital room, and her grandmother had said, "What I wouldn't give for one more June day." She wanted to talk with her friends on the porch, eat a bowl of raspberries with whipped cream on top, grill out, stay up late playing cards with the two of them. And the weather would be warm, not hot. Big cloud, blue sky weather. Lena had excused herself, went to get tea, and hoped that at the end of her own life, she would only want one more good, but not special, day.

I meant to ask him, What did you do to me? But it came out as Why would you do this to someone? My mouth said it multiple times. I didn't mean the drug, I meant the experiments. But Smith took it to mean the drug and said he knew it wasn't ready. Why do you do this job, I asked him.