Quotes from Julius Lester

Goodness was not a trait you acquired; it was a value you practiced when you were on the verge of doing evil.

Being a failure at living your own life as best as you can is better than being a success living the life somebody else says you should live.

If I canot know your name, may I light a lamp so I can see your face?' If you sould ever see my face, you will lose me forever.' Why?' Psyche wanted to know. 'Are you ugly? Are you afraid I won't love you if I see your face?' Perhaps I am afraid that if you see my face, it will be THAT that you will love and not me.' I understand, believe me. I know what that feels like.

Some wounds go so deep that you don't even feel them until months, maybe years, later.

But there are times when a tree can no longer withstand the pain inflicted on it, and the wind will take pity on that tree and topple it over in a mighty storm. All the other trees who witnessed the evil look down upon the fallen tree with envy. They pray for the day when a wind will end their suffering. I pray for the day when God will end mine.

the racial divides in the United States will not be overcome until lynchings of all kinds are as painful to nonblacks as they are to blacks, until each of us become guardians of the sufferings history has bequeathed us.

Love happened. Love came to show you that you could be more than you could ever imagine, because love forced you out of the narrows of yourself and thrust you into a vastness that stretched from one end of time to the other. Nothing mattered except being in the presence of love, the greatest beauty of all.

To give good hugs you have to have some soft places. —Jeremy Richards

I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see that our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details.

There was an end to weeping. Mourning, however, ebbed and surged but never ceased flowing.

What would they do if I said I hurt so much I feel like I want to die? —Jeremy Richards

While the subject matter is lynching, on a deeper level, this novel is about identity. Whom and what we identify ourselves with determines our characters, determines who we are, and what we do.

He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.

the object of learning was not to build a better mousetrap but to ask a better question.

Books, and especially fiction, do not proceed from ideas. They are born from feelings

Perhaps one of the writer's tasks is to weave himself into others' pain.

The young accept the extraordinary as normal because they do not compare their lives with those of others when everyone is like them.

Faith is not something that one has; faith is something that one practices at the very moment in your life when you really don't believe anything, and you're in the worst kind of despair.

I had not given a thought to what a difference it can make when you treat another person with simple respect and dignity, the same respect and dignity you want for yourself. That is so simple, yet so few seem able to do it.

Stagolee was, undoubtedly and without question, the baddest nigger that ever lived. Stagolee was so bad that the flies wouldn't even fly around his head in the summertime, and snow wouldn't fall on his house in the winter. He was bad, jim.

But I want you around even when I don't need you. —Jeremy Richards

...part of the mind's job was to cast doubt on what the heart knew to be true, and the heart, because it had no words, often lost the argument