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.

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?

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

All I've ever wanted was to be near you.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

Between work and your kids and your spouse or whatever situation you have in your life. I think balancing all of that seems to be a huge situation.

Badgers know where their strength lies. Do you?

The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.

Healing and positive life change comes from having the courage and spiritual conviction to look squarely at life's impermanence.

Tell them to send everything that can fly.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

I was conscripted to military service, and my gut feeling was to refuse to serve. I did not want to kill other people. This seemed to me wrong, if not in principle, so at least in practice.

It's not hard to draw from within yourself to play someone protective of her daughter. I have animals and I'm a daughter, sister, wife, aunt and friend, and I can be fiercely protective.