“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.”

“You act like your whole life was one long January afternoon." Lawrence said. "It wouldn't do any good to go around with my head in the clouds.”

“I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.”

“...Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.”

“I have looked at my father many times and wondered how he could stand knowing he was my mother’s ruin. He was too weak to leave her. Mother should have thrown him out and saved them both, like Sissy was saving the two of us.”

“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.”

“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.”