“Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.”

“Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship.”

“I tend to watch silently from the shadows. You learn a lot more that way.”

“Or if he takes whatever dull job he's stuck with -- and they are all, sooner or later, dull -- and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.”

“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.”

“He pulled himself out of hard times, dealt with the scars from it, pushed himself to make a mark. A little bit of the wild side there, always. I told myself, oh no, I won't get tangled up with this one. And I said it again, even when I was tangled up.”