“The teacher did say we can help one another. Cooperative learning it's called. That's where you borrow someone else's brain because yours isn't big enough.”

“You can swim, too." he says. "Where did you learn that in District Twelve?""We have a very big bathtub.”

“Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”

“There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.”

“And no matter what, there's not one thing in this world *or* the next that we can do or hope or guess at or wish or pray that can change it or help it one iota. Because whatever is, is. That's all. And all there is now is to be ready for it, strong enough for it, whatever it may be. That's all. That's all that matters. It's all that matters because it's all that's possible. ”

“It isn't what kind of house you have that matters. This is not happiness. It's what kind of mind you have, and how you care for your fellow man -- what you can do to help others who can be helped by no one else.”