“The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome.”

“Go about your work with a quiet confidence that cannot be shake...No matter what happens, remember if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains.' (Ducky Drake, UCLA Track Coach)”

“So the two went: the boy who had escaped from darkness because he loved light more than he knew and the girl who had become ordinary because she did not realize how wonderful it was to be a princess.”

“Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some far way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smokey, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her.”

“More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.”

“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.”

“He had braces, sported a black Limp Bizkit Tshirt. Limp Bizkit is a band that was popular at the time. If you’re fortunate, you’ve never heard of them.”