Quotes from Bernice L. McFadden

she would watch with glee as Rain was relegated to standing in her shoes; Easter hoped to God they pinched.

The next day the stock market crashed. Hemmingway didn't quite understand what it all meant, but from the way the white people in town were running around like chickens without heads, she took it as an omen.

I'm sorry that your journey into my life was such that you had to endure so much suffering. But if that is the road God had you travel in order for our paths to cross, then we have no choice but to accept the purpose it has served and be grateful for it.

She giggles at the thought and realizes quite suddenly that Donovan is religion to her.

she swung like a pendulum, ticking away the seconds until she would be dead.

She giggles at the thought and realizes quite suddenly that Donovan is religion to her. She folds her hands and bows her head. She'd asked for him. Had

The people in his Harlem did not speak, they sang their way through conversations and disagreements,

Joe lulls the man into the afterlife, places his head gently on the ground, closes the lids over his empty eyes, retrieves his gun and continues to fight for a freedom he would never be fully entitled to.

Baby, everybody got their own reasons for doing things they do in life.

Over time her inhibitions took shelter in the corner of the room and Easter allowed the music to swallow her,

What kinda women you is? You gonna let a man lay up on another woman in your own house and not do nothing about it?

That's who we were, wartorn meadows on the verge of new growth.

No, that's my Christian name. Why? Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody, You included," Sugar said with a laugh.

It was in his high school music class that he first became acquainted with a battered caramel-colored Stella Parlor. When Harlan raked his fingers over the six strings, his entire body vibrated. He'd never thought of himself as incomplete - one half of something he could name - but there it was, the very thing that had been missing from his young life.

For many years, Tass's life was like an echo.

she'd seen people stand on the shoulders of hate and pluck money and power from the very top shelves of the universe.

Over the past week Pearl had taught Sugar how to bake, and Sugar showed Pearl, with the help of a large ripe cucumber, the technique of giving hand and giving head. Pearl wriggled her nose in disgust and shook her finger at her in reproach, but her eyes never left the cucumber. Sugar saw that Pearl had finally allowed curiosity and possibility to couple.

Only the Strong is a lushly atmospheric and passionately written piece of work, bursting with colorful characters that shine on every page.