Quotes from Tia Williams

to live, no money. I don't know what, or when, or how. But I do know who. With the utmost certainty, I know who.

To his credit, he knew this was a terrible idea. To his discredit, he was doing it anyway.

Stay ready so you don't have to get ready.

One time, while waiting in a Kmart checkout line, five-year-old Shane had seen some guy steal a waffle iron from a woman's cart while she wasn't looking. His mind had quietly spiraled over it. What if waffles were all she had to feed her thirteen badass kids because their dad squandered her modest bank-teller salary on fantasy-football bets and scratch cards? What if her life depended on that waffle iron? He'd obsessed about it for days.

He buried his tongue inside her, massaging her clit with his thumb—and that's when Jenna began to fall apart, shuddering uncontrollably, moaning his name. Only then did he cover her with his strong body, kiss her devouringly, and sink inside her. Eric knew she wanted it fast, but he fucked her slow—as slow and deep as he was kissing her—and his measured intensity knocked Jenna into a thundering

white-hot orgasm that seemed to emanate from everywhere at once. In that moment, the only sensation she felt, the only thought in her brain, the source of all the pleasure in the world, was Eric.

When it's real, you don't fall in love with any awareness. You don't get a say. You get hit fucking hard and then process it later. You know?

And snakes used to ruin him. Just the idea of them. Shane couldn't bear the thought of those delicate-looking reptiles trying their hardest to travel around their patch of forest while legless and footless. It broke his heart! They were so unfairly handicapped. He used to obsessively sketch pictures of snakes with four legs, until it occurred to him that he was, in fact, drawing lizards.

Grown women knew better than to attach themselves to time bombs. Teenage girls couldn't wait to be ruined.

Eva wanted things. She'd just forgotten how to get them.

By virtue of being a woman, she's stronger. Girls are given the weight of the world, but nowhere to put it down.

Delight in everything! Have an actual life and live it! She vowed to herself to be honest—with herself and with everyone. In pain? Admit it. In love? Claim it. Life was too short to be anything but herself.

I want to know without words. I want to fall so violently that I risk breaking into a million pieces.

The world was too loud for little-boy Shane. What he didn't know was that he was training himself to be a deeply empathetic writer—understanding nuanced emotion, spying humanity in unexpected places, seeing past the obvious.

But my contribution to these troubled times will be inciting white women of a certain age to sexually profile Black student athletes who'd really just like to make it to the NBA in peace.

This isn't about him. It's about me. Occupying all the space I need to. Standing tall in exactly who the hell I am. A damned good mom and writer with a terrible disability who overcomes it every day and whose best work is ahead of her and whose ass is perched for the gawds in her dress.

Her teenage fury had morphed into something else: power.

You're a legend 'cause you write about me.

This moment, the three of them together, it was her default fantasy—always in the back of her mind. But she'd forbidden herself to think it was attainable. After all, was it ever possible to really have it all? Did happy endings truly exist in real life? Maybe they did. Maybe this was hers.

Moving to New York was about reinvention. If you didn't want that, you stayed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

I had no idea that I'd end up working for a woman who can't decide if I'm a career-ender or her boyfriend.

You can't imagine the utter bottomlessness of my uninterest in your opinion.

We were never friends. You were the boss, and I was your geisha. A feisty one at times, but I was never unclear about my position. My job was to be the person you wanted me to be.

These partygoers hadn't been the cool kids growing up. They'd spent their adolescence buried in art books, scrawling poems into steno pads during recess, living full stories in their heads. Distracted by their artistic micro-obsessions, many forgot to learn how to engage with the world. They were too busy studying life, storing up their notes to use later in a novel, a song, a script, a painting. They were observers, not joiners.