“Cinci made her way to the jagged piece of concrete Langley had dropped. She picked it up, and with the look of a mathematician deep in thought she briskly made her way to her unconscious, bleeding stepfather. She took that piece of concrete and began pummeling the man's skull.”

“Prior to her reading of the poem, light tears washed over him. He seemed to be leaking out moments that were, as far as he could tell, stored in physical parts of his body – in his shoulders, his back, his stomach. His body remembered things that his brain ignored.”

“I think when we read we have to hear with no ears and realistically see with no eyes and doing that does something good to us.”

“Sometimes I'm beside myself wondering who is next to me.”

“she had given me a piece of what made her life sane.”

“She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.”

“the only way Bex would miss this would be if she were unconscious. And tied up. And in a concrete bunker. In Siberia.”