“Bosoms, are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for occasions with dignity.”

“Bosoms,” she announces, with a hand to her own, “are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for occasions with dignity.”“Well, what do you want her to do, Eleanor? Leave them at home?”

“I wait on white ladies who walk right out the bedroom wearing nothing but they personality...”

“For four days straights, I sit at my typewriter in my bedroom. Twenty of my typed pages, full of slashes and red-circled edits, become thirty-one in thick Strathmore white.”

“But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”

“I never once heard her say she gone leave Leroy, and Minny don't say things twice. When she do things, they done the first time.”

“Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.”