“That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel. ”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“Yeah, that's funny, huh?...Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.”

“We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.”

“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?”