“People want to look at you and see your whole future laid out the way they know it, and I was saying that didn't happen. People aren't born with I'M GREAT! flashing on their foreheads.”

“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”

“I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.”

“I wanted to love my father. I wanted to, but I didn't. Sometimes I didn't even like him. he hadn't been a guy you could really get next to, because in a way he was never where you thought he was.”

“That's the thing people can't see when they're explaining to your butt what's going on and how you messing up. They can't see that you knew it long before they did.”

“Sometimes, when things look terrible...you just need to find the right move to turn the whole game around. When you find it you feel great.”

“Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.”