“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman's hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I've come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes.”

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”

“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.”