Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.

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.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can't control it, they destroy it.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

Scientists found that there are exactly as many skin pigment colors to the various races of this world as there are different colors of soil [dirt].

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

I ain't a bit ashamed of anything.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

People always come up to me and say, Oh, you're Chloe Se-VIG-ny, right? Sevigny. Number seven, letter e.

In Hollywood they say there's no business like show business. In the hood they say there's no business like ho' business.

Leadership is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go.

Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial.

Linda Hamilton is my hero. She was so tough and so strong and so vulnerable at the same time. I think that's what woman action figures are allowed to be: vulnerable, in a way that women are.

Truths that wake To perish never