“I looked after that Dudley family for too long, over six years. His daddy would take him to the garage and whip him with a rubber hose-pipe trying to beat the girl out a that boy until I couldn't stand it no more.... I wish to God I'd told John Green Dudley he ain't going to hell. That he ain't no sideshow freak cause he like boys. I wish to God I'd filled his ears with good things like I'm trying to do with Mae Mobley. Instead, I just sat in the kitchen, waiting to put the salve on them hose-pipe welts.”

“I wish he was mine," he said. The words slipped out without thought, but there was no taking them back..."I love Gus," she said, cutting him deep, deep. "Not only is he my husband, but he is honorable and noble and good, and I vowed before God that I would love him." She made a harsh tearing sound in her throat. "When I saw him that day, when he knocked me over with his bicycle, he was like something out of a dream, my dream." She looked at him, and her eyes glittered like shards of glass. "Oh, God, God, how could I have known, how could I have known? Up until that moment, you see, he was the closest thing I'd found to you.”

“I'd convinced myself it would have been different if he'd been as ugly on the outside as he was on the inside, but he wasn't. He was cruel beauty, a sculpture, a god, and I couldn't tear my eyes from him. I'd seen his expression soften in the dungeon with the whip. I'd do anything to have him look at me like that again, no matter how insane he was.”

“He ain't big and he ain't strong, but that boy's got a by-God streak of fight in him. And he was going to need it.”

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. All I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.”

“Ed looks at me like he wishes I'd disappear and if I had the choice I'd grant that wish; I'd turn into smoke and blow away. I want to sit on the other side of the table from him so he doesn't think I'm interested, but there's no room on the other side so I sit as far away from him as I can and try to have an out-of-body experience. This couldn't get more awkward if we all tried."How about we get some air?" Leo asks Jazz, and they walk outside. Daisy follows them and Dylan follows her. Okay, it could get more awkward if we all tried.”