“She denied and feared God in the same breath. She allowed our actions to shame her, and yet was void of shame. I truly believed there was something unnatural about her - a madness only her children could see. My yearning was not to understand it, but to escape it.”

“Fear was a thing I understood all too well. It was a malignancy that had spread throughout my body until my mother, in her godly wisdom, had diagnosed and cauterized it.”

“Satan is not going to leave. The only way to get him out is to invite God in, and God is not welcome in my mother's house.”

“I touch my scar to remind myself that I am not a coward. I am a Quinn.”

“What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?”

“I wanna leave here myself. But when I leave, whether it's on a bus or train or in a pine box, somebody gon' know I was here.”

“I began for the first time to really understand the loss my adoptive mother must have felt from not having her own child. I was terribly sad for her and realized that she had missed out greatly - we both had - and there was nothing I could do to change that. I could never be her natural daughter and I could never make her feel better about that loss. Guilt is a strange waste of time in the cold light of day.”