“With kids, what you see is what you get. There's just truth in their innocence that we as adults have lost and will never regain.”

“Well, darling, don't your worry your pretty little head. I've got a type, and you ain't it.”

“For some reason, the despair that's welling up in me is transforming into white-hot rage. I feel it working its way up from my toes, winding around my legs, and burrowing into the pit of my stomach. It spears its razor-sharp tendrils through the pieces of my broken heart. It's crippling, and devastating, and unrelenting. I have only one choice to survive this; I turn that rage outward.”

“One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers--some, not all--and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal -- Milton, Wordsworth, Keats -- was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave.”

“Someone always says, 'Kids are mean.' 'Kids will be kids.' Which implies that the kid bullies will grow out of it someday." The muscles in his jaw tightened. His stare was unfocused and far away. "I don't think they do. I think kid bullies turn into adult bullies.”

“If I need something you can't give, I need to walk away, because sooner or later, all I'll see is what you can't give. I won't be able to see what you can.”

“I want you,” Drew said. “Just you. I used to go through every day without thinking about the future, but with you all I can see are the possibilities of the experiences we could have together.”