“Never trust a white person black people don’t like.”

“I wish I could trust you, Reed, but I know I can’t.” His brow furrows in confusion, but there is a wry tilt to his lips, “Why?” I give him a small smile of my own, “You think you’re different from men like Caleb. You see everything in black and white, you don’t care about the whole story; you don’t care about the gray. Some stories aren’t black and white, Agent Reed.”

“Personally, I don’t like inherently happy people. I don’t trust them. I think there’s something seriously wrong with anyone who isn’t at least a little let down by the world.”

“Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.”

“There’s a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work.”

“He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope.”