“His pain was his most precious and secret possession, and Six held on to it as fiercely as a jewel robbed from a corpse.”

“His soul was susceptible to god's whimsy, just as his body was susceptible to any opportunistic thing that might hurt it. If he'd known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.”

“Six wasn't sure religion was any more than a lot of people caught up in a collective delirium that disappeared the minute they stepped out of the church doors and onto the street.”

“It seemed to him that every time he made one choice in his life, he said no to another. All of those things he could not do or be were huddled inside of him; they might spring up at any moment, and he would be hobbled with regret.”

“The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She’d left him with all their children. She was holding another man’s baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.”

“At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.”

“Pride brought down a lot of folks. One of these days you gon' have to turn around and look at whatever it is you running from.”