Books

14 Magical 'Another Brooklyn' Quotes

by Sadie Trombetta

There are those times in your life when you're in a reading rut, when you can't find a single thing worth reading — but then there are other times, like book awards season, that you're TBR pile is too big for your bookshelf. In case you haven't gotten around to reading Jacqueline Woodson's bestseller and NBA finalist, these Another Brooklyn quotes will show you just why so many people are talking about this book.

Another Booklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, $8, Amazon

Another Brooklyn is an illuminating coming of age story about a group of friends in 1970s Brooklyn, four black girls who are inseparable, spending every moment together, from the days of double dutch to the nights of disco dancing. That is, until their lives take them each in different directions, and the girls who promised to "always and all ways" be best friends find themselves closer to strangers than childhood companions. An introspective study of female friendships, Another Brooklyn expertly navigates through the realms of childhood and adulthood, of memory and dreams, of growth and death, of love and the deepest losses.

A remarkable book filled with beautiful lines and breathtaking passages, here are 11 Another Brooklyn quotes that will prove this novel deserves it's spot on the NBA finalist list. You might want to get the tissues out for some of these.

1. “I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”

Another Booklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, $8.14, Amazon

2. “Sylvia, Angela and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves.”

3. “In the deep heat of summer, we watched as kids circled around the heroin addicts, taking bets on whether or not they’d fall over.”

4. “When you’re fifteen, pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow.”

5. “I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”

6. “Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures.”

7. “She said women weren’t to be trusted. Keep your arm out, she said. And keep women a whole other hand away from the farthest tips of your fingernails. She told me to keep my nails long.”

Another Booklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, $8.14, Amazon

8. “The four of us together weren’t something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.”

9. “I was barely speaking. Where words had once flowed easily, I was suddenly silent, breath snatched from me, replaced by a melancholy my family couldn’t understand.”

10. “If someone had asked, Are you lonely? I would have said, No. I would have pointed to my brother and said, He’s here. I would have lied even as the empty street on rainy afternoons threatened to swallow me whole.”

11. “We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.”

12. “Something about the curve of our lips and the sway of our heads suggested more to strangers than we understood."

Another Booklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, $8.14, Amazon

Images: Jerome Prax, Lucie Delavay, Cristian Newman, Himanshu Singh Gurjar