“People said he should smile more. He generally avoided those people.”
Source: How to Be a Normal Person
“There was a smile on his lips, a private one, aimed out the window at the rolling fields of corn and the endless blue sky, not at me.
But it was my smile regardless.”
Source: Cloudy With a Chance of Bad Decisions
“But that’s not it. At all. I know it’s not because there’s sometimes when he smiles at me, that one smile he only does for me, and my heart starts to race and my skin starts to itch, and I feel sweaty and alive and like I could take on anything that was thrown at me, if only he would smile at me like that again”
Source: Who We Are
“One smile speaks louder than a library.”
Source: Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“You’re thinking too hard. I can see it on your face. Just be here. Right now. With me.”
And how could I refuse that?
I said, “I’m here.”
“You are.”
“Right now.”
“Yes.”
“With you.”
And god, how he smiled at me.”
Source: Heartsong
“The rusty, broken sound crawled up from his throat, and he was huffing out his nose, but he was smiling, and I understood then what Joe had seen in Ox, why Gordo and Mark were always going to find their way back to each other, why Kelly never stopped searching for Robbie. It was warm like a summer day. It was candy canes and pinecones, it was epic and awesome, it was dirt and leaves and rain, it was grass and lake water and sunshine.
It was a forest so alive, so untouched.”
Source: Brothersong
“A smile is the cure that makes all miseries disappear.”
“She smiles, and its soft and loving, and the look I always imagines on the woman I would spend the rest of my life with.”
Source: You've Got a Place Here, Too: An Anthology of Black Love Stories Set at HBCUs
“After class, if she got out early, sometimes I'd catch
her
downstairs writing up her notes. And she'd smile
and I had to bite back every single corny thing I'd ever
wanted to say, like: All off me is an invitation reaching toward you, or
my fingertips ache where they haven't touched your skin or
I hear the promise of us in the crescendo of every ballad
and maybe I was supposed to be a bachatero instead of a pilot
because all I had were torch songs for a girl I barely knew.”
Source: You've Got a Place Here, Too: An Anthology of Black Love Stories Set at HBCUs
“Loneliness is a state of emotional pain. Being alone is a state of physical removal. Loneliness can be debilitating. Being alone can be empowering.”
Source: Better than Happiness: The True Antidote to Discontent