“I just know there's an albino living in the colored quarters. I can feel it in my bones.”

“I thought I was going to die right there on the spot. I've never heard anything so terrible in my whole life. I hope she is wrong and I never get a period. I am eleven years old and entirely too young to hear about it. Can you imagine my mother not knowing what Kotex are for and dusting the house with them? Well, her mother can just tell her what they are for. I'm not getting into the facts of life. I haven't heard one fact of life I like yet.”

“Grandma Harper has two green bottles shaped like women with black hair painted on their heads and a yellow glass colored captain's hat that she keeps her face powder in that I want too, and a picture of a naked girl in a swing, swinging way up in the air over castles in a blue sky.I don't know why I want those things, I just do.”

“You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.”

“I found out I got ringworm from Felix. If it gets in my head, they will have to shave off my hair. I'll be bald just like Eisenhower, and I am a Democrat.”

“Hazel always used to say There's not enough darkness in the entire universe to snuff out the light of just one little candle.”

“That's what I'm living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.”