“We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, but if we didn’t act right, they would put us out. That’s how folks do.”

“A hanging, though, was something different. I got to thinking. We hadn’t never been to nothing just to have a good time. A hanging was special and we was all getting to go.”

“Toward the end, a band that had a young fellow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—I remember on account of him saying it two or three times and laughing every time that he did—played a song called 'All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.' It made the grown folks, most of them anyway, howl laughing. I don’t think I ever seen Mama laugh so hard. When it was about over, the sheriff come up and made them stop playing it, but he was grinning, too, so I figured he was just making them stop as part of the show.”

“There are two political truisms: Old people vote and Republicans eat their young.”

“You see, Novelka, in an odd sort of way, some of our strongest relationships are with people who have died. We miss the person, we think of them, we wonder what they would want us to do, how they would want us to act. Though they are not here, they still strongly influence our lives. And so we go on loving them, sometimes even more, when they are gone.”

“We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.”

“We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!”