“It wasn't a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.”

“One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes.It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing, to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

“No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.”

“How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”

“Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.”

“Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.”

“Well, it probably won't live. They say the way her mama beat her she lucky to be alive herself. She be lucky if it don't live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking. Can't help but be. Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground. Well, I wouldn't worry none. It be a miracle if it live.”