“All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.”

“On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.”

“We're all damaged in our own way. Nobody's perfect. I think we're all somewhat screwy. Every single one of us.”

“When the management iceberg is shaped like a huge phallus, you know that there are a lot of tossers that the top penguin has had to climb over to reach the tip and that there is no shortage of the same caliber of penguin in the balls and shaft of the corporation, just waiting for their chance to get a spurt to the top. Should I sugar coat this a little more? or tell it like it is?”

“She had once been described, by one who saw below the surface, as a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell.”

“I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete.”