- "People who think dying is the worse thing don't know about life." (2)
- "Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets -- it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me." (78)
- "The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where someone dabs mercy on your beat-up life." (82)
- "But she's white, August." (87)
- "I hadn't known this was possible -- to reject people for being white." (87)
- "There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss." (88)
- "Well if you have a queen and a group of independent-minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you've got a swarm." (93)
- "Lily, I like you better than any girl I've ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me fore looking at girls like you." (135)
- "You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart -- now that matters. The whole problem with people is...[T]he problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it...[T]he hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters." (147)
- "Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about." (148)
- "I loved the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living." (148)
- "It seemed to me it would be better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether." (155)
- "I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother, I told her. You are the mother of thousands." (164)
- "You cannot fix the whole world." (166)
- "Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long." (170)
- "It takes so much energy to keep things at bay." (171)
- "Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness." (172)
- "A roach is a creature no one can love, but you cannot kill it. It will go on and on and on. Just try to get rid of it." (175)
- "He chose to stand there and be one of them." (179)
- "It's something everybody wants, for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters." (185)
- "In life there are things you can't get over no matter how hard you try, and that sight is one of them. May walking into the trees with a little circle of light bobbing in front of her, then swallowed up by the dark." (188)
- "This had been the thing they'd been waiting for half their lives without even realizing it." (194)
- "Take my advice and call your aunt and tell her to come on and get you, even if she isn't a hundred percent well. These are colored people here. You understand what I'm saying? I'm just saying it's not natural, that you shouldn't be...well, lowering yourself." (198)
- "Mostly, though, I saw the blaze of love and anguish that had come so often into her face. In the end it had burned her up." (199)
- "August took Rosaleen's hand and pulled her over, then went on holding it, the way used to hold May's sometimes, and it struck me that she loved Rosaleen. That should like to change Rosaleen's name to July and bring her into their sisterhood." (203)
- "I was afraid, though, the blame would find a way to stick to them. That's how blame was." (204)
- "...life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life." (206)
- "Not one person in the room said, Sugar-Girl, really, talking about while people like that and we have a white person present. They didn't even think of me being different." (209)
- "We can't think of changing our skin," he said. "Change the world - that's how we gotta think." (216)
- "I don't know what got to me about it, but for some reason that circle of feeding made me feel better about the world." (226)
- "There a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course." (236)
- "...people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different." (248)
- "You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind." (249)
- "Knowing can be a curse on a person's life." (255)
- "But you can't talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you're not." (259)
- "I felt like I'd unzipped my skin and momentarily stepped out of it, leaving a crazy person in charge." (259)
- "I figured May must've made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved." (276)
- "People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, 'I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.'" (277)
- "Regrets don't help anything, you know that." (280)
- "How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is." (285)