“Tonight, I'll strip off all this armor and let it be as it was before..”

“By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go….Miss Leefolt, she’d narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns”

“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.”

“But Lou Anne, she understood the point of the book before she even read it. The one who was missing the point this time was me.”

“I set her on her wooden baby seat so her little hiney don't fall in and soon as I turn my back, she off that pot running.”

“Lord, I never seen blue hair on a black woman before or since. Leroy say you look like a cracker from outer space.”

“Stuart stands and says, 'Come here,' and he's on my side of the room in one stride and he claps my hands to his hips and kisses my mouth like I am the drink he's been dying for all day and I've heard girls say it's like melting, that feeling. But I think it's like rising, growing even taller and seeing sights over a hedge, colors you've never seen before.”