“You could know a man not by what his friends said about him, but by how he treated his servants.”

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“You can always tell how a man will treat his wife by the way he treats his mother.”

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

“This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.”

“The line in the sand was drawn. A man did not sleep with his friend, especially not a man like him, one utterly incapable of caring for a woman outside of the bedroom. He couldn’t treat Cass that way. He would not touch the friend. No licking the friend, either. If he could get away with not looking at her, he’d do it.”