“What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?”

“I mean, sometimes I wonder why God would grant a favor if trouble's just waiting around the corner? It feels disingenuous. If it's fate, then it's written in the stars, and we can't do much to avoi...”

“You ever think about the noose?''I been thinking about the noose since I was born.”

“Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything.”

“At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the worlds rivers, betwe...”

“Oh no. Don't smile. You'll kill me. I stop breathing when you smile.”

“I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the...”

“He had a charm about him sometimes, a warmth that was irresistible, like sunshine. He planted Saffy triumphantly on the pavement, opened the taxi door, slung in his bag, gave a huge film-star wave,...”

“He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

“1. I think what haunts many people in the world is to lose something they love, something they value, and someone they care for, for me it was my father, I was losing him when I met him. I felt lif...”