“Voshak's hair, a pale blond braid, which he bleached, was his trademark. It made him memorable. That's how the slavers operated. They adopted costumes and personas, trying to make themselves larger-than-life and hoping to inspire fear. They counted on that fear. One could fight a man, but nobody could fight a nightmare.”

“As he presses me against the car and his fingers tangle in my hair, I find myself hoping-and fearing-that I'll never be the object of such a love, one that could bring a man to his knees and never let him stand again.”

“All his life had been based on this hostile kind of strength; a strength that viewed the world as a thing to master, to overcome, to fight. As a problem that might be solved by destroying. It seemed faintly ridiculous to him now; and he found it difficult to remember that a life could be based on such fear. There could, he thought , be no impulse to destruction that was not rooted in some terrible fear, and he was no longer afraid.”

“The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name - fear - need - dependence - hatred?”

“But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.”

“You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers – the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?”