“ 'Sugar, aint you ever had no good time?' she said with a bit of sadness in her voice. 'What you mean?' Sugar said,...'Seems to me that I ain't never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.''Just smile? Smile at what? At who?''Smile into the air, girl!' she said and waved her arm through the air....you better start, 'cause time is running and a life without good times ain't a life worth having.”

“Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.”

“J.W. and Roy didn’t just snatch the childhood away from Emmett; they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi.”

“Listen, if you choose to believe nothing else that transpires here, believe this: your body does not have a soul; your soul has a body, and souls never, ever die.”

“Drink it,” I told her. “It’s good for what ails you. Caffeine and sugar. I don’t drink it, so I ran over to your house and stole the expensive stuff in your freezer. It shouldn’t be that bad. Samuel told me to make it strong and pour sugar into it. It should taste sort of like bitter syrup.” She gave me a smile smile, then a bigger one, and plugged her nose before she drank it down in one gulp. “Next time," she said in a hoarse voice, “I make the coffee.”

“Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is."Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile."That you would be good in a war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet.”

“Just to see you smile I'd do anything that you wanted me to. When all is said and done I'd never count the cost, cause it's worth all that's lost just to see you smile.”