Quotes from Marie-Elena John

His soul,' she would say, 'picked mine up and we flew.' And to those who gave her a disbelieving look, she would insist. 'Have you never touched someone and felt them? Felt what was inside of their body?' Only a few would know what she was talking about.

That was just the means by which he would be totally and constantly surrounded by Black people; and it was the means by which they would all know his name.

She learned yet another critical fact, which is that those male animals have the good sense to interfere only with females in heat, but that men lack the sexual intelligence or instinct to leave their disinterested women alone.

He could have a twenty-minute discussion with a semiliterate horticulturalist who spoke a dialect so thick it could not be called English, but he couldn't start a conversation with Lillian about love. Instead, he offered only this: "Barbuda's got pink sand, and seventeen miles of unbroken beach.

We don't have anything like that here. War masks and so on.

And in spite of all the killing they did in his name, they said he was a good God, a God of Love.

The more important the event, the more elaborate the costume. Of course God could not care less what she wore, or who baptized the child. But God was not Catholic; Icilma was. The baptism would have to be done in full regalia. She

He repeated his question. "Your love life?" "Same old, you know. Nothing out there. All the good men are gay.

Icilma always noted that their poverty never ran so deep as to prevent them from beautifying their surroundings:

He was so intent on running away from the specter of his parents' life that he had never stopped to properly consider what he should have been running toward. Teddy

The power of a confession is such that judges and juries will take the word of the accused as gospel—even in the face of evidence that clearly proves that they are lying.

One should never blame gods, he believed, for the use to which human beings put them.

The people who were downstairs drinking ran upstairs for a better view of the upcoming fight.

And then Matilda answered her own question because the truth was that Mary-Alice had no idea. "If a man is going to abandon a woman, he will do it for other reasons. He will not abandon her because he gets married." Mary-Alice

And Iris was far too beautiful to escape the appetite of the men—or the expectation of the women, seeking respite from that most tedious and taxing of their household duties.

She treated her patients with medicine and she treated them with prayer and sacrifice and ritual, because for her there could be no clear separation of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.

That's why they can't get ahead. Wouldn't look for work, just living like they still slaves. Sitting down on they backside talking 'bout slavery, slavery. Everything for them is slavery and white man fault. Blaming slavery when is they own laziness causing they problems, with they no-ambition selves. Still taking what massa give them and calling it welfare." Margaret

Some might have said that he was color-struck, but color had nothing to do with it, it was all about where he had come from and where he wanted to go—it had been all about the climb.

It wasn't enough for Teddy to know that his family could not be counted in the statistics of poverty—among those who did not rely on government subsidies of any kind: they went to work; they owned their own home; their sons did not go to jail; their daughters got married before they got pregnant; there were few drug addicts and alcoholics among them—and those who succumbed did so in the privacy of their homes and not on the street disgracing everybody.

And there would be nowhere else for them to go with their conversation after that except to the bedroom

He had been, he thought, her friend, when in fact he had always been her entire world. Inside

Why would you want to go look for that wicked girl?" she asked. "Because I never thanked her," Lillian said, but she was really hoping for forgiveness.