Handsome Vanilla
Ani Baker
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The locker room is so quiet around them. Older girl walks away and Amber has to slowly continue changing her clothes and try not to shake from a more potent blend of confusion and embarrassment than I had yet experienced or imagined or knew to fear.”
“No, you're not numb. In fact, you are quite the opposite. You feel things so extraordinarily with the very power of your imagination that by the time they occur in real life, the tangible event simply cannot compare to the feeling you made with your mind.”
“I'm dead if I'm not wired Crucified if not proclaimed Cut off if not in contact Devoid of soul if not ashamed Terminal if not content Last in line if not number one Sorrowful if not elated All is lost if all's not won Eternal tipping of the scales They fail to balance out Doomed to drown in rushing floods Or perish in a drought”
“One great thing about the course of life is that there will be a multitude of times when you'll think to yourself, "I wish everything could be just like this, all the time." And you'll think it more than once. And you'll mean it more each time.”
“I'm overwhelmed with that powerful blend of confusion and withering embarrassment that leaves a person motionless and forces a brain to move forward as if it hadn't witnessed the incident that fashioned the feeling.”
“I tell ya, the live ones put more death in the place than the dying. In the time I was there. I watched my grandma try to tell the same story three times to two nurses and one doctor and she was told to stop talking each time. She'd barely get two sentences out before they'd shush her. She's dying. Silence won't save her, let her talk.”
“You knew I was alive That's why you talked to me about wounded birds You knew I would talk about wounded birds I didn't know you were a wounded bird”
“When I fell, I instantly had my "Oh, That's Why" realization and I would have known not to rollerskate through the house again, even if I had been alone. There is a loss of dignity that a child experiences when they've just suffered the consequences of something they were warned against by the Wiser One while the Wiser One gloats for being wiser, especially when the gloating is packaged as anger. But I was too young to examine gloating or anger or wisdom and she, the mother of a timid child who rarely got hurt, had not had many opportunities to consider the vulnerable state of an injured kid. We were both green and hurt and scared in this new way, together. As an adult, it helps me to view my mom as a singular woman beyond her role in my life, but also, as a child herself who does not, in fact, possess knowledge of all things. Our mother-daughter relationship was this huge, life-altering thing that we are both experiencing for the first time, at the same rate and we don't have answers, we only have things that we're trying out. This was true for my grandmother too; she was learning to be alive for the first time.”
“When Huy was young, his classmates called him "wee wee” because of an unfortunate linguistic coincidence that shaped the part of him that constructs identity beneath a title. When he dwelled on the identity that his name began constructing for him in childhood, a loud American Schoolyard memory of boys and girls yelling "wee wee" at him was dominant, within a mental file full of similar confusion that came back to him as obnoxious, repetitive shaming.”
“We're told there does a world exist Spinning beyond our roof We slept outside again last night We're looking for the proof”
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Book Keywords:
family, reality, love, relationship, empathy, wishing, memory, american, fear, girlhood, absorbed, passion, uncaring, embarrassment, daughter, identity, poem, hospital, imagination, numb, unempathetic, motherhood, bullying, grandmother, philosophy, confusion, old-age, togetherness, wounded, life, mother, argument, death, poetry, nuance, names, school, extremes, observation, overwhelmed, childhood, elderly, feeling, healthcare, complexity, black-and-white
