Breaking Night: A Memoir Of Forgiveness, Survival, And My Journey From Homeless To Harvard Quotes
"Each pair offers the same small, rounded shape, only instead of my mother's brown, I have Grandma's rich yellow-green."
"I wonder where I will sleep tomorrow—at another friend’s apartment, on the train, or in some stairwell?"
"In my years with nowhere to live, behind the locked bathroom doors in different friends’ apartments, I’ve secretly played this game in the mirror throughout all hours of the night."
"The symmetry of our lives has become clearer to me lately."
"You should have seen this woman look at me like I was nuts, going through her neighbors' bags."
"If you know something's good for you, go right ahead and get it, and let them go blow it out of their asses. That's their hang-up."
"We sat together, all spread around the living room, facing the flickering TV."
"Behind the gaudy glass storefront of the check-cashing place, there was something for everyone."
"I ate all my eggs," I said, but no one was listening.
"Everything was simply wonderful, dear. I'm just glad to have been given another day from our Lord to come see my beautiful girls."
"Don't curse, Lizzy. God doesn't favor a foul mouth."
"My baby's growing up," Ma said, ignoring the woman's intrusion and briefly hugging me to her side.
"A comedian. I want to tell jokes onstage," I declared.
"Ma! Look what I brought you, pumpkin. Go get your sister."
"I had no idea how different we could be from other people. All I knew was Ma was a real mother then, and my parents, together, tended to our needs."
"The doctor’s just going to do a test. Okay, Elizabeth? It won’t hurt; it’s just a little uncomfortable. Hold still and be a brave girl, okay?"
"Lizzy, tell Ma about every time Ron made you feel bad, baby. You can tell me, pumpkin, please."
"Elizabeth, honey, this will be over soon. We just need you to put your feet here for now. Be a good girl and stay still."
"That’s all, Elizabeth. We’ll be outside. You can get dressed now, honey."
"You can take it for only so long before you tune out."
"If I wanted to squeak by unnoticed in class, or be a 'good' daughter at home, or a 'normal' person to my friends, I needed to tuck away parts of myself."
"I cherished Rick and Danny’s family, yet in the time I’d known them, I had never mentioned my own family or given any real details about my home."
"Unlike the guys, I had no curfew and I coaxed them to stay out too late, disregarding their mother’s rules. It’s not that I wanted them to get in trouble, so much as I didn’t want them to leave."
"I wondered what other opportunities were out there for me."
"I was sure of my ability to work, if they would just allow me to."
"As long as I was able to work, I was beginning to feel as if I didn’t have to be stuck anywhere."
"By one o’clock, I had made almost as much money as it had taken me the whole day before to gather."
"Each one was neatly arranged, the weight distributed evenly, the items sorted in the correct clusters."
"Simply being home was enough to make this version of Ma happy."
"The thought of how much I didn’t know about her bothered me; it made us feel separate, and I hated that."
"No matter how fast they run, Lizzy. Once they see it coming, it’s already too late to escape."
"The repetitive clink carried me into sleep until a closer, more urgent sound brought me back, waking me."
"Some nights I searched through plastic trash bags along the sidewalk for defective store clothing, a trick Daddy had taught me."
"It’s not that I never went to school, but more like I passed through it the way a net passes through water, passively snagging whatever happens to drift inside."
"I just needed to have life around me—the pulse and vibration of people out in the world doing things."
"Sometimes, I had company. Rick and Danny abandoned class to ride the number 4 train with me, back and forth on its Lexington Avenue line, for hours."
"I traded school for this. I traded my home for this. Soon, I accumulated two steady absences: one from school and the other from our apartment."
"The ride home always snapped me back to reality."
"Because if logic were enough to change things, I suppose she could just as easily turn to Ma and ask, Why are you on drugs, ma’am?"
"Her question struck me in its directness and in its airtight logic."
"People said things like that all the time, but who could explain, nuts and bolts, what they meant?"
"Get your life together. What did that even look like?"
"Something had stolen away the affection between Ma and me and reduced our interactions to casual, distant ones."
"I didn’t expect to graduate sixth grade and go on to junior high school, given all of my absences, but somehow I did."
"I was good at that, tuning out official notices from school and child welfare."
"Whenever it got dark outside, I flipped on the lights in every room of our three-bedroom apartment, and I turned on Lisa’s abandoned radio."
"In the backseat of the car, I sat with a bag in my lap. No one spoke a word to me."
"I was, for that period of time, a witness more than a participant in my life."
"The heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wondered, did these people think I was crazy?"
"If I was sent to a place like this and no one would talk to me like a human being, did that mean that something was wrong with me?"
"Life is about taking charge, and being responsible for oneself."
"I understood her because if I did, I’d be closer to getting home."
"But I loved the feeling of being clean and the brush of laundered clothing on my skin."
"Don’t test Auntie, ’cause Auntie don’t play."
"It felt strange to know that people showered every day, and to be one of them."
"But more than anything, Talesha talked about her baby son, Malik."
"And there’s always someone to love you when you have a baby, and always somebody you could love, too."
"Don’t do that, Lizzy, you’ll end up with no goddamn options when you get older. You don’t want to end up stuck."
"I’ll always be in your life … No matter how old you get, you’ll always be my baby."
"For the first time ever, I had no doubt that I would be at school tomorrow."
"The only difference to me so far was that every so often I found myself staring a little longer at one, or feeling slightly more curious or impressed by things they did."
"But from her face, there was no sign that she noticed."
"Sometimes, when she snored in her sleep—a cute little whistle—I’d reach down and touch a piece of her hair, run it through my fingers, stare at how, in the darkness of our room, the moonlight turned it glossy as polished onyx. I will keep her safe, I told myself."
"The closest Ma came to eating food were the cocktails and sedatives she took randomly throughout the day—she never had an appetite anymore."
"Ma was in a living hell and as much as I wanted to, I could not protect her."
"I knew that without my returning to help, Ma could be slumped over in her bedroom doorway, stuck; unable to lift her own weight off the toilet; or crying helplessly for water from her room."
"I tried my best to hide the excitement rushing through me."
"Life seemed to be rushing in on me, and all I felt I could do was duck and cover."
"It’s amazing that when there is just too much to deal with at once, the mind can compartmentalize."
"When Ma had first come in, he ran to hold on to her arm and back—to support her, not reluctantly, but warmly, as though he saw right past the ugliness of the disease and through to her, the person beneath it all."
"I’m someone who loves Liz very much, someone who’s been wanting to meet you."
"You’ve come a long way, Jean. You should be proud of yourself."
"Sleep well. Everything is okay now, sleep well."
"Don’t worry, Liz, I’m going to help you through this."
"Isn’t that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are solely responsible for yourself?"
"No matter how exhausted we were or what slant he put on our situation, I was only breaking night, fending off the dark until the sun rose each day."
"Life should always feel like this, filled with simple happiness."
"Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other."
"I’m reckless and I neglect everything, especially you."
"Going with the flow was so much easier than pushing against it."
"We had real estate appointments yesterday. You missed them."
"For a moment, Sam and I sat in bed together and were totally quiet. I needed something to happen."
"My absence from those parties was a form of protest."
"Maybe you could be a prostitute without knowing it. Maybe all it took was compromising yourself for the sake of gaining something in return."
"Part of what makes losing you so hard is all the things we will never get to say to each other."
"People see pearls as beautiful, perfect gems, but never realize that they actually come from pain."
"The gravity of our loss washed away the pettiness of everything else."
"I had a recurring nightmare that I turned my back on Ma when she needed me most, and because of it, she kept dying all over again."
"This couldn’t go on forever. And just the thought of being in dire need and having to, one day, hear my friends flat-out say no to my hunger and my need for shelter—and to turn away from my desperation—well, the thought of that rejection was just too much to deal with."
"I never really had to worry about rent before, but now that I absolutely had to worry, I was trying to grasp the concept of actually getting an apartment and gathering the money for rent."
"Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is."
"Sometimes I’d pace outside the building for a little while, taking deep breaths, mustering the courage to enter."
"For years, maybe for my whole life, it felt as though there was a brick wall down the middle of everything."
"Welfare wasn’t a solid life plan, but for right now bills were due and the check must be cashed."
"If life could change for the worst, I thought, then maybe life could change for the better."
"It was possible that I could get into the next school, and it was even possible I could get straight A’s."
"I ditched the idea of pizza and went for the interview."
"Speaking what I wanted was totally different from just thinking it. Speaking it made me connect; I could feel it."
"My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them."
"Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options."