"It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or leaning."
"Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood."
"but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confirmed to their roles."
"It was simply a small pattern in the grand design of our lives. If other children didn't move so much, it just went to show that our lives were fated to be different from everyone else's in the world."
"I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me."
"That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it."
"She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations."
"For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience)."
"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."
"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."
"Anyone I reckoned, sufficiently afraid or sufficiently dull could be polite. But to be able to operate at a top level with both adults and children was admirable."
"so which concrete angel glued to what country seat had decided that if my brother wanted to become a lawyer he had to first pay penance for his skin"
"We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer-women, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."
"As a species, we were an abomination. All of us."
"'I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty of give me death."
"'Annie, my policy is I'd rather stick my hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's.'"
"When the spell wore off he asked Uncle Willie what colored people had done to white people in the first place."
"Through food we learned that there were other people in the world."
"Each day she faced us with a clean slate and acted as if ours were clean as well."
"Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective."
"With the optimism of ignorance I thought that the morning was bound to bring a more pleasant solution."
"I reasoned that I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss."
"But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."
"'That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, "Can't Do is like Don't Care." Neither of them have a home.'"
"I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer."
"Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of."
"Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with superior forces of maturity."
"But it's mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment."
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