“Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.”

“Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.”

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”

“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.”

“My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.”

“The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.”

“... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary”