“You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.”

“The experience of listening to an hour's music you barely know in a dead language you do not understand is a strange falling and rising experience. For minutes at a time you are walking deep into it, you seem to understand. Then, without knowing how or when exactly, you discover you have wandered away, bored or tired from the effort, and now you are nowhere near the music.”

“Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.”

“Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.""Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.”

“But sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother - or your sister. Even if they don't, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don't matter if they do or they don't see that for what it is - all you can do is put the feeling out there. That's your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That's the deal.”

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”

“A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’ . . . ‘And I don’t know why I’m surprised. You don’t even notice it – you never notice. You think it’s normal. Everywhere we go, I’m alone in this… this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor . . . ‘I gave up my life for you. I don’t even know who I am any more.’ . . . ‘Could you have found anybody less like me if you’d scoured the earth? . . . My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made me look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?”