“see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.”

“The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race--which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wished fo...”

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their bro...”

“The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabblin...”

“Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the word...”

“But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it...The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as th...”

“The journey is greater than the destination.”

“One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its lifea springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own ...”

“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will ...”

“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arr...”

“You don't always need to know your destination when you set out on a journey.”

“On a journey the face of reality changes with the mountains and rivers, with the architecture of the buildings, the layout of the gardens, with the language, the skin colour. And yesterdays reality...”

“If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall li...”