“I had a few pricks of conscience- seeing Henry's pajama bottoms hanging forlornly from a peg in our bedroom, his comb on he dresser, a stray white hair on his pillow- but real shame and regret were absent. In their place was a riotous sense of wonder. I'd never imagined myself capable of either great boldness or great passion, and the discovery that I had reservoirs of both astounded me.”

“How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.”

“Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It's in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman they's itching for. White men already got her, they thinking, You mine now, just wait and see what I'm gone do to you. Colored men ain't got her and ain't never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her.”

“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment.”

“She reached out and stroked my hair just as she had when I was a child. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me, feeling utterly safe.”

“Daddy shook Pappy's hand, then Henry's, then hugged the children. At last he turned to me. Softly, in a voice meant for my ears along, he said, "When you were a year old and you came down with rubella, the doctor told us you were likely to die of it. Said he didn't expect you'd live another forty-eight hours. Your mother was frantic, but I told her that doctor didn't know what he was talking about. Our Laura's a fighter, I said, and she's going to be just fine. I never doubted it, not for one minute, then or since. You keep that in your pocket and take it out when you need it, hear?”

“[He] had a hole in his soul, the kind the devil loves to find. It's like an open doorway for him, lets him enter in and do his wicked work.”