“Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.”

“The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”

“The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.”

“It was a year when Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe with the countries neat and different-coloured. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour.”

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

“There are times when a man's greatest need is to have someone to love, some focal point for his diffused emotions. Also there are times when the irritations, disappointments, and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate.”

“We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known”

“For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.”

“There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.”

“It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and looseand turning a thousand miles an hour.”

“They are the we of me.”