“I'm not lying to you," she said, shaking her head. "I really can't do it.""You can and you must," they snapped. "Those stories belong to us. It doesn't matter what language they're in, or what they're about; they belong to us. And we gave them to you without looking at them first. So now it's time to see what we've done.”

“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”

“Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand?”

“She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now--even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.”

“What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable.”

“I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of death' and then they keep on with the screaming.”

“When things are serious and either Amy Eleni or I need to beat our personal hysteric, the informal code is to seize your head and twist coils of your hair around your fingers and groan, "I'm not mad! I'm not mad! I don't want to die!" And if you have a friend who knows, then the friend grabs her head too and replies, "There's someone inside of me, and she says I must die!" That way it is stupid, and funny, and serious.Our hysteric is the revelation that we refuse to be consoled for all this noise, for all this noise and for the attacks on our softnesses, the loss of sensitivity to my scalp with every batch of box braids. Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We're scared by the happy, hollow disciple that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer. We need to know what that biscuit-tin discipline is, where it comes from. We need to know whether it's a sign that our bones are turning against the rest of us, whether anyone will help us if our bones win out, or whether the people who should help us will say "You look wonderful!" instead.”