“As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.”

“We someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only...”

“Once the woman decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free... The older Jo =got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free r...”

“A little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn't name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable ...”

“Maybe he wouldn't end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he'd be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.”

“But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

“Every evil starts with 15 volts.”

“My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.”

“Neither love nor evil conquers all, but evil cheats more.”