Black Cake Quotes
"Everything goes back to the island and what happened there more than fifty years ago."
"Love was a mystifying thing and the way it could corrode, doubly so."
"The human being was born to be a ginnal and it was a rare person who didn’t take advantage of a weaker one."
"It was years before Benny realized that she had already evolved into a person who could smell the weather in a handful of flour."
"The three people Benny loved most in this world no longer made any attempt to hide their doubts in her."
"Could there still be a bit of Ma’s DNA on this cup? Could her mother, perhaps, not be fully gone from this earth?"
"Scientists have found DNA in ice dating back hundreds of thousands of years."
"Those four words: Benedetta, please come home."
"One of the things that made you human was your willingness to deviate from the script."
"Sometimes all we really want is for somebody to acknowledge that we were right all along."
"You had to love the sea more than you feared it."
"We need to go easy on the seabed, we need to allow it to flourish."
"Tradition? How about coconut gizzada? How about mango ice cream?"
"She was turning out to be quite an accomplished young lady, in addition to being very beautiful."
"Don’t forget that you going to a place where the people dem not all black. You a woman from the islands and you need to behave better than dem."
"Each of us must decide for ourselves how much sin we can live with."
"In the end, we are our choices, and we have to live with them."
"Sometimes, the stories we don’t tell people about ourselves matter even more than the things we do say."
"You can look at a person and truly have no idea what they are holding inside."
"The beauty of a thing justified its plunder."
"The world needed decency, even more than it needed brilliance."
"What defined a person most was not what, or whom, they had held close but what they had allowed themselves to let go of."
"The fact was, you could not guarantee that you and your baby would be all right."
"A person can still be happy after everything they’ve been through, can't they?"
"We hadn’t seen those around here much anymore."
"What you need to do, Byron, is know who you are, and where you are, at all times."
"Surfing is really a relationship between you and yourself."
"If you don’t see someone out there who looks like you, you need to go for it, anyway."
"Tradition is only about what people have or have not done; it’s not about what they are capable of doing."
"Are you going to let someone else’s view of who you are and what you should do hold you back?"
"Do not underestimate the value of applying yourselves in school."
"What happens when love and loyalty are in conflict with each other?"
"It’s as if there are so many choices that it’s no longer possible to know which path is right for you."
"Her mother, too, struggled to find her way despite other people’s expectations, other people’s definitions of the kind of woman she was supposed to be."
"Benny and Byron would never have been enough to fill the gaps that remained, would they?"
"In the minds of others, he is a black man, first, second, and always, which would be fine if it weren’t to the exclusion of everything else."
"She feels as though the crook of Byron’s elbow is the only solid thing in her life right now."
"She had, after all, brought her suitcase to the house with her."
"Byron believes that a lot of the people who follow him online really do get how important underwater mapping is."
"His parents sacrificed so much to give Benny and him a good life. Is he doing right by them?"
"She’s never slept in her childhood home without her parents."
"Marble feels the buzz of her mobile phone through her purse."
"Benny had wanted to go to that university almost as much as her parents had wanted her to be there."
"The thing about the island where Pearl grew up is, a lot of people end up leaving."
"Pearl tried to take care of Covey after her mother left but it wasn’t enough."
"The children will always be children, no matter how old they get."
"Pearl is standing in her backyard, flanked by Covey’s children, and trying to act normal-like."
"After Gibbs Grant went to England and never came back, people took to saying that maybe he’d become too big for his britches."
"That’s the thing about false narratives that ultimately define your life."
"Whenever it has hurt Lin to think about such things, he’s reasoned that Covey had little choice."
"Byron grabs the cane from the old man’s hand and flings it to the ground."
"Survival is not enough. Survival has never been enough."