“When Blue sang, a lyric became a libation; a song became a sacrament.”

“We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.”

“What looks like crazy on an ordinary day, looks a lot like love when you catch it in the moonlight.”

“When you're young, there's a whole lot of stuff you say you'll never do. Once you get a little older, the list tends to get shorter.”

“Sometimes the contradictions in their lives are so intense they seem manufactured for teaching life lessons, but it's hard to keep up with what you're supposed to be learning in that terrible moment between defiance and despair when all your energy is going into figuring out why it took so long to name the thing that's driving you crazy. At those moments, the best I can do is keep quiet and say a little prayer, which is what I did.”

“If you don't annoy your big sister for no good reason from time to time, she thinks you don't love her anymore.”

“It is my belief that conscious African American students ought to be in a constant state of rage and in a constant search for ways to channel that rage into freedom struggle.”