“Because being comfortable meant she might lower her guard, and she could not let that happen.”

“Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.”

“She's fragile because you let her be fragile.”

“She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.”

“I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.”

“He was her enemy, and she hated him because she could not hate him enough.”

“a man would know the women he was meant to be with because she made him weak. Till he claimed her and she made him strong.”

“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.”

“That's her secret, I suppose. Everything that happens to her she's proud of. She makes it special by it happening to her.”

“She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.”