“There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons . . .”

“You know, one of the interesting things you find about writing fiction is that any fiction you write has to be political. Otherwise, it goes into the realm of fantasy. So like, if you write about a woman in America in 1910, if you don’t write that she can’t really control her property, that she can’t—doesn’t have any say over her children, that she can’t vote—if you don’t put that in it, then it’s a fantasy. Like, well, how is her life informed? That’s true about everybody. If you write about black people, you write about white men, I mean, it has to be political. A lot of people don’t realize that, it seems.”

“The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.”

“A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”

“The government isn't real," he replied. He might have been talking about Santa Claus or God. "I don't owe anything to anyone who in themselves are lies and liars.”

“That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.”

“I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.”