“She hasn't your strength. She's never had any strength. She's never had anything but heart.”

“He is tremendously strong, she thought, and liked the idea, even as she had feared that strength when she first met him”

“But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”

“… though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.”

“He expects nothing, she thought, because he's never had anything. And nothing was expected of him. He was free in a way she never would be.”

“She's anything but typical;
She's so unpredictable.
Oh but even at her worst it ain't that bad.
She's as real as real can be
And she's every fantasy.
Lord she's every lover that I've ever had.
And she's every lover that I've never had.”

“My mother was pregnant with me while she was in prison. She was her own attorney, never been to law school. She was facing 300 and something odd years. One black woman, pregnant, beat the case. That just goes to show you the strength of a black woman and the strength of the oppressed.”

“Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater.”

“She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.”

“One young lady asserted that she had never looked at any of the cards in the cars in which she had been riding for years. When questioned further, it appeared that she knew by heart almost every advertisement appearing on the line (Chicago and Evanston line), and that the goods advertised had won her highest esteem. She was not aware of the fact that she had been studying the advertisements, and flatly resented the suggestion that she had been influenced by them. Some of the goods advertised were known to her only by these advertisements, yet she supposed that they had nothing to do with her esteem of the goods. She supposed that she had always known them, that they were used in her home, or that they had been recommended to her. She did not remember when she had first heard of them.”