“People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.”

“That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.”

“It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that's the way the world worked—people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can't have everything you want at the same time.”

“You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?”

“Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...”

“Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.”

“You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.”