“Lots of people hate gay people.You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, "It's not like I hate gay people.”

“Who isn't interesting enough to help -- what forgotten woman sits in a lawn chair in her yard with a can of soda pressed to her thigh, and the radio blaring the death toll of Texans, who were victims of a record heat wave? Whose inner voice sits quiet like an obedient dog and never says, go go go.I want to go places I've never beenBecause I haven't failed there yet. So you can understand a little better,How a disgruntled waitress might pack her dogAnd a few belongings and head for a townShe dreamed of, searching for something to breakThe spell of monotonous, morbid night speak.”

“The daughter wants to turn the past on its back like a turtle or a roach, leaving those legs walking futilely through air cheering on those starved and paralyzed years. The mother put her makeup on, got ready for work, while cigarettes burned down, one by one in the chipped, red ashtray. The daughter stood beside the blaring alarm clock and shook the mother's sleeping body who worked sixteen hours a day and called the daughter and son from pay phones between jobs. When the mother found the daughter on the lawn of the mental hospital playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on her harmonica the mother couldn't believe it, because she was gone the years that led to it. When they finally came together, they came together as guilty mother and guilty daughter and found there was nothing there to trade.”

“do you or don't you know the two worlds I'm talking about,the world that doesn't existwhere you wish you could beon the dirt road that stretches out of Idahoaway from the cave and family?The girl you want lives there. All my life I've wanted to be the grand gesturethat forces the mouth open in disbelief Instead I was the lamp cord, collecting dust and never moving.It's easy to be the destroyed one.”

“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.”

“Its strange how people say love and hate are opposites, when in truth they have so much in common. Both are the stronger than we will ever know or realize, they have the power to blur the sane. For a man in love will sacrifice himself for who he loves Just as a man in hate will kill in rage.”

“It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park.”