Libba Bray

Writer

1964-03-11

Quotes by Libba Bray

• What about you and me, Adina?— Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. "I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?"Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock —n' roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn't exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she'd invented as much as he'd invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn't be the same mistakes. Starting now."Sorry," she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. —Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.

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• No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We're all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they'd like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.A fissure forms in the vessel. I'm cracking open.

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• It had the word bitches in it, which is perfectly fine to use if you're a rapper or a director making a movie about career women, but not if you're a teen girl talking about her homies.Good point, Petra. We know that young ladies of the teen persuasion do not use these indelicate words. Nor do they have thoughts about sex, masturbation, violence, being competitive, or farting.

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• Because the pure girls get rescued. Mary Lou felt something she didn't let herself feel often. She was well and truly pissed off. Why do girls have to be all pure and innocent and good? Why don't guys have to be?

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• It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl.

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• Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us.

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• Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.

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• Centuries of fighting, and for what? I say. Today it ends. I can't live in fear any longer. I've cursed this power. I've both enjoyed and misused it. And I've hidden it away. Now I must try to wield it correctly, to marry it to a purpose and hope that is enough.

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• I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl. He sounds bitter and sad.If the world will not forgive me, I say softly, I shall have to learn to forgive myself.He nods in understanding.And how will you marry? Or do you intend to marry?I think of Kartik, and tears threaten. I shall meet someone one day, as Mother found you.

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• Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find.

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• I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday.

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• I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.

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• America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn't forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

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• The land has a memory. Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.Under it all, the dead lie, remembering.

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• May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.

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• Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself?

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• I don't know why I feel so wounded with Kartik's obvious infatuation with Pippa. There's no romance between us. There's nothing that tethers us but this dark secret neither of us wants. It's not Kartik's longing that hurts. It's my own. It's knowing that I'll never have what she has--a beauty so powerful it brings things to you. I fear I will always have to chase things I want. I'll always have to wonder whether I'm truly wanted or whether I've just been settled for.

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• Brought to you by The Corporation: In your homes and in your pants.

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• But Gemma, you could change the world.That should take far more than my power, I say.True. But change needn't happen all at once. It can be small gestures.Moments. Do you understand? He's looking at me differently now, though I cannot say how. I only know I need to look away...We pass by the pools, where the mud larks sift. And for only a few seconds, I let the magic loose again.Oi! By all the saints! a boy cries from the river.Gone off the dock? an old woman calls. The mud larks break into cackles.'S not a rock! he shouts. He races out of the fog, cradling something in his palm. Curiosity gets the better of the others. They crowd about trying to see. In his palm is a smattering of rubies. We're rich mates! It's a hot bath and a full belly for every one of us!Kartik eyes me suspiciously. That was a strange stroke of good fortune.Yes it was.I don't suppose that was your doing.I'm not sure I don't know what you mean, I say.And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.

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• Our mouths and bodies speak for us in a new language as the trees shake loose a rain of petals that stick to our slickness like skins we will wear forever. And just like that, I am changed.

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