Highlights from this book
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Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.
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Bones, like anything, strong until they weren’t.
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Oh girl, we have known little bit love…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.
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We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war.
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Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?
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That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return.
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It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way.
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She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.
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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.