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.

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.

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.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.

Be careful who you trust, the devil was once an angel.

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.

People think that being on Star Trek is career suicide, but it's really just the opposite

The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

Suffering is getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get.

How unfortunate it is to be constrained by what people might say at our funeral or on our gravestone.

There's so many things going on in the world, Babies dying. Mothers crying. How much oil is one human life worth. And what ever happened to peace on earth.