“If you can not answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.”

“It answers to the name of Henry, but you can call it Library Boy.”

“$1,200, That was the price of a man in those days. Now you can call him black, or you can call him a slave, but he was a man nonetheless.”

“The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.”

“You can love one man and leave another and love a man and still leave him and leave a man without ever loving him, you can fuck everybody you meet or live like a nun and in the end you still wind up at Target.”

“He’d undone all he could. You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven, but you can’t call back the futures that your bad decisions lost”