“We collected all the bones we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned."A thing like that should serve the living," Bankole said when she offered it."You are living," Natividad said. "I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.”

“Power came the way a child came -- with agony.”

“People do blame you for the things they do to you.”

“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

“There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break.”

“Read every day and learn from what you read.”

“I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.”

“I'm very happy alone.”

“Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”

“I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.”