“I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?”

“Forever in your armsIs where I want to beHolding you closeWithin the spaceThat once held only me...Forever in your warmthThe place for me and youI feel the sunOur life's just begunI know you feel it too”

“Wherever your heart rests There I will live and be blessed I've tried to line up the things I Needed to say but now my feelings just Tumble from me. I am half foolish, Half drunk with wanting you With wanting to take your hand And leap into the darkness of whatever Life will bring. Love makes me Brave and without love I'm made Nothing.”

“I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?”

“People told me to give up trying to be special and settle down to a regular life. There ain't nothing wrong with a regular life, and that's the Lord's truth...But it wasn't for me, because I wanted to be something special...I knew how easy it was for a dream to die. I seen that all around me. You could let it die by just looking the other way—you know, some of those Asian people say they don't kill nothing, but they'll take a fish out of water and lay it on the ground and then say it just died on its own—you can do that with a dream, too. And sometimes you can get so frustrated, you feel so bad about your dream, that you go on and kill it yourself. When you do that, you're killing a piece of yourself, too." —Mr. Cephus”

“The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.”

“In a way it was like a bunch of guys in a game. They were falling behind every minute that passed, but they had lost interest in the score. It was as if they were just a ton behind and had given up on the win. And maybe deep inside they didn't want to peep the score, maybe they knew what was happening but just didn't want to think about it anymore. I could understand that. I had played enough ball in my life, and was deep enough into my game to know I had to be in the hunt for a win or I could lose who I was. And once I lost who I was, my inner me, then all the CDs and all the iPods and all the bling in the world wasn't going to make it right. The strange thing was that everybody was feeling the same thing, that there was a huge game going on, and that the game was going to decide who was a winner and who lost. But so many of the brothers on the corner didn't have a play...I could feel for them because they were just like me in most ways, thinking that everybody should have a number, everybody should have the same playing time, and knowing it wasn't going to happen.”