“Dreams begin when you stop to pick up the penny - you realize the continual effort you must endure to have something worth obtaining.”

“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.”

“ '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 be what you isn't, just be what you is, cause if you is what you isn't you isn't what you is.”

“She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”

“Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.”

“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.”