Handsome Vanilla Quotes

“The locker room is so quiet around them. Older girl walks away and Amber has to slowly continue changing her clothes and try not to shake from a more potent blend of confusion and embarrassment than I had yet experienced or imagined or knew to fear.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“No, you're not numb. In fact, you are quite the opposite. You feel things so extraordinarily with the very power of your imagination that by the time they occur in real life, the tangible event simply cannot compare to the feeling you made with your mind.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“The locker room is so quiet around them. Older girl walks away and Amber has to slowly continue changing her clothes and try not to shake from a more potent blend of confusion and embarrassment than I had yet experienced or imagined or knew to fear.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“One great thing about the course of life is that there will be a multitude of times when you'll think to yourself, "I wish everything could be just like this, all the time."
And you'll think it more than once.
And you'll mean it more each time.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I tell ya, the live ones put more death in the place than the dying. In the time I was there. I watched my grandma try to tell the same story three times to two nurses and one doctor and she was told to stop talking each time. She'd barely get two sentences out before they'd shush her. She's dying. Silence won't save her, let her talk.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“It was important for me to understand that I was only a very small part of her picture. She was a person before she was my grandmother, and that was something I had never precisely considered.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I'm overwhelmed with that powerful blend of confusion and withering embarrassment that leaves a person motionless and forces a brain to move forward as if it hadn't witnessed the incident that fashioned the feeling.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Maybe if she would have written things down in a notebook; details smaller than her life. Maybe if she would have turned them into a song. Maybe if she had a picture. These are the ways to remember things that your mind doesn't on its own commit. However it chooses what it does to commit. However.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“In an instant, she was free from this small commitment and any kind of freedom feels good. She much preferred that invites came faceless this way, so she could say No without saying anything at all. A voice without a voice; what a rare, modern treat. The world made it easier all the time for her to feel connected, but alone, and therefore free.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“When I fell, I instantly had my "Oh, That's Why" realization and I would have known not to rollerskate through the house again, even if I had been alone. There is a loss of dignity that a child experiences when they've just suffered the consequences of something they were warned against by the Wiser One while the Wiser One gloats for being wiser, especially when the gloating is packaged as anger. But I was too young to examine gloating or anger or wisdom and she, the mother of a timid child who rarely got hurt, had not had many opportunities to consider the vulnerable state of an injured kid. We were both green and hurt and scared in this new way, together.
As an adult, it helps me to view my mom as a singular woman beyond her role in my life, but also, as a child herself who does not, in fact, possess knowledge of all things. Our mother-daughter relationship was this huge, life-altering thing that we are both experiencing for the first time, at the same rate and we don't have answers, we only have things that we're trying out. This was true for my grandmother too; she was learning to be alive for the first time.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“You knew I was alive
That's why you talked to me about wounded birds
You knew I would talk about wounded birds
I didn't know you were a wounded bird”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I was fawning
I think I thought you were fawning
There was life around everything we touched
Most of me was very alive
And I think I thought you wanted to be”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“And I said, "See, this is passion"
You beamed and glowed
And it was at me
But it was not for me
I wilted and you were the live one
And as quickly as it came, it left
And we both slumped
And the little life left in me wanted to go
And I spoke to that part
Take that little life and leave
It can be bigger again
But you asked me to stay
Saying Help Me over and over
And just like you knew
I would want to talk about wounded birds
You always knew that I always wanted to help
So I killed myself and I stayed
And we were casualties together
Finally connected.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“If you're reading this, then this book is for you. If not, well then, this book is for me.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Nibiru, are you around here? Come." Sometimes, he envisioned spoken words in his head as though they were printed in the air and he saw this word - come - all lower case letters in size 9 font. No exclamation point, perhaps two of those wavy dashes on either side, signifying impotence. He was too ashamed to shout without company, nobody there to give him permission to disturb the night's peace, nobody to cushion the blow of odd glances if a person saw him and thought his actions peculiar.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“His tone had been regretfully similar to a man's he had never met, but who remained ingrained in him as an example of what to never become.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He rolled his window back up and turned off the radio, thinking about all the other possible lives that he would never be challenged to live.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Again the news crawl of Meg's words made its way across the designated space in his head. This time, size 14 font, white lettering on a black background, the first letter of each word capitalized: This Divide Between Us Is Made Up Of Things That You Haven't Done. The Problem I Have Is With The Things That You Don't Do.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“We're told there does a world exist
Spinning beyond our roof
We slept outside again last night
We're looking for the proof”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I know I will never be alone. The baby will make me a god. When I am a god, I can create whatever I want.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“This is why I'm against marrying young. When you're young, you marry your holes and burrow into them like a childhood bed, until you realize that you've outgrown the bed, and then it's, you know, the hassle of wanting a new bed, of looking for a new bed, of getting a new bed, assembling the bed, adjusting to the bed.
I don't want to be reminded of my childhood bed.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“She asks me if I'm new. I feel how badly the question "Are you new?" stings when you're not new.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Sometimes, I really buy into the romanticism of the city and I think about the little places my future children will learn that their mother visited and it will seem to them untouchable, magical, and historical in a relatable way.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He envied the Brian Smiths of America, who could hide inconspicuously in an SAT question or exist unnoticed across a nametag on a display desk in the office furniture section of IKEA without someone reading the name out loud as though it were a question.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“When Huy was young, his classmates called him "wee wee” because of an unfortunate linguistic coincidence that shaped the part of him that constructs identity beneath a title. When he dwelled on the identity that his name began constructing for him in childhood, a loud American Schoolyard memory of boys and girls yelling "wee wee" at him was dominant, within a mental file full of similar confusion that came back to him as obnoxious, repetitive shaming.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Huy smiled every time he remembered to smile, to send a message that he wasn't unhappy. He had learned how to stop people from asking him what was wrong. He wasn't unhappy, he was happy to come and he was happy to watch and he was happy to listen and laugh. He figured his friends must have thought he did not have any opinions on the things they were discussing, but he did, and he wrote them down when he got home.
Just because you're not good at speaking, doesn't mean you're not good at listening and thinking, he wrote on the inside front cover of his black and white speckled composition notebook.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He remembered it being a midnight movie, but most hours of the dark feel like midnight when you're seven.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Also, someone stating that an experience being experienced a certain way, takes away from the experience, is absurd to me. "If you've never been in the lake with no clothes on before, then you've never been in the lake" is an outrageous statement, and a false one. I would venture to guess that the experience would be the same, with or without clothes, due to the relatively unrestrictive nature of swimwear. To be fair though, because I do value fairness and demand it from others, I could be wrong about my assessment of this. I, myself, have never been in the lake.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“Middle School is such a perfect name for middle school. If I were told that there was a commission for nationwide title submissions for the grades between elementary and high and a committee was appointed to boil down the entries in search of a name that was simple, public friendly, easy to spell, syllabically chantable (Mid-dle-school! Mid-dle-school!) devoid of possible copyright infringement, and most importantly, evocative of the emotion of being In Limbo, and Middle School was the out and out winner, I would believe that.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“This is the first fight that I've been around for and I know instantly that the terrible adrenaline flung into the crowd with the force of two flailing fighters will never be my drug.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla