Brother Quotes
"But it’s been ten years since last we’ve spoken. And in the silence thick between us it feels like even the smallest dishonesty will ruin this reconnection."
"A truck blasts suddenly past us on the avenue, spraying slush on our pant legs and shoes. Aisha swears, but when our eyes meet she offers a thin smile."
"You have to understand Mrs. Henry. She is one of the many certified Mothers of the neighbourhood, a force, a stern uplifter of fallen individuals, especially of those parents afflicted with troublesome, wayward children."
"She was never happy about abandoning us, and if she learned the evening before of an impending night shift, she would spend precious sleep time cooking and worrying over the details of meals and activities for the following day."
"Our school was named after Sir Alexander Campbell, a Father of Confederation. But we the students of his school had our own confederations, our own schoolyard territories and alliances, our own trade agreements and anthems."
"By the time Francis turned eighteen, he spent almost all his time away from me and with boys I didn’t know well at all. They were older and from different parts of Scarborough, not just the Park."
"It had become almost unrecognizable. Our neighbourhood now a crime scene cast hard in the clashing brightness of emergency."
"The Rouge was not 'nature,' not that untouched land you could watch on wildlife shows or read about in history books. The Rouge wasn’t the sort of place you could pretend to have discovered, nor imagine empty and now your own."
"I don’t want others in my life. I don’t want houseguests or questioning conversations. I certainly don’t want more drama for Mother."
"She is the proof that those who have suffered enormous loss can also endure."
"It takes a few seconds to recognize that these lights are from a snowplow and road salter making their way down the avenue."
"She’s here for the neighbourhood. To see and remember."
"Business has been good at the store, its aisles crowded with shoppers filling their carts."
"It’s about attitude. It’s about possessing the right mindset."
"She’s become a writer, she tells us, the paid kind."
"I’ve been thinking a lot about that place since my father died."
"This would be good for your mother. This would be good for you, too."
"We tough it out into the final hour and finish with already stiffening limbs."
"There are losses that mire a person in mourning, that prevent them from moving forward by making sense of the past."
"A moment in which all sorts of things suddenly became possible."
"Like the sort of woman who puts tinfoil up on she windows? Like the sort of woman who advertises ‘tinfoil’ to everyone passing on the street?"
"I decided that I needed ammunition. I pulled from a display marked "Classics" a paperback copy of The Theban Plays."
"He does what we all do these days, Michael. He gets by."
"Maybe open the front door a bit?" he suggests.
"You ever actually think about your future?" he yells after me.
"Come home, Zion wanderer. Come home, Zion wanderer."
"It's okay," he explains. "I know it's a lot to process at once. Let's just start from the beginning."
"Around the airport, a field of sharp light pushed back at the surrounding darkness, creating a stark contrast between the illuminated space and the enveloping night."
"I remember feeling afraid, though of what I did not know. Something old and unburied in the darkness, something closer to us now than ever before."
"The sun still hadn’t risen, and I remember looking at Francis, who lay beside me very still with his eyes wide open, searching for a clue about our situation in some slight movement of his ear, or of his jaw."
"Mother stayed quiet, just nodded and looked out the window at the coconut trees towering black against the evening sky, and the old untended fields of cane stretching out like a sea."
"Fears were banished by the scents from simmering pots, denigration countered by a freshly laundered tablecloth. History beaten back by the provision of clothes and yearly school supplies."
"Whole chapters of time spent in quiet aloneness, reaching up in concentration to touch her own earlobe, to pinch it gently while something on the page stilled her."
"But look closer," she said, eyes still closed. "Cup your hand and feel the proof of them against you. They're not trash. They're living things. And they're flying."
"The times she visited her beauty salon, and how she leaned her hair back into a sink, her eyes closed in pleasure, another woman’s hands in her hair."
"She came towards us on the couch. She sat on the armrest beside my brother and said she was sorry for being away so long."
"I remember helping Mother to rise to sign some papers. And I remember watching, mesmerized by the time she took with the script, the immense and terrible care, the elegant loops at the beginning of her name."
"It is a new day," she says firmly, offering a statement of hope and renewal despite the challenges faced.