“This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and though...”

“I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me'.”

“Did you just mentally pistol whip that guy, with his own gun? Nice, Amber. I would have just killed him.”

“Getting up from the bed, Dominick approaches me at a slow predatory pace. Once again, I cannot move my feet.”

“Goddamn it, do it yourself. Youre five hundred years old and you cant use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”