Quotes from Delores Phillips

What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?

Satan is not going to leave. The only way to get him out is to invite God in, and God is not welcome in my mother's house.

What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?

She denied and feared God in the same breath. She allowed our actions to shame her, and yet was void of shame. I truly believed there was something unnatural about her - a madness only her children could see. My yearning was not to understand it, but to escape it.

I wanna leave here myself. But when I leave, whether it's on a bus or train or in a pine box, somebody gon' know I was here.

Fear was a thing I understood all too well. It was a malignancy that had spread throughout my body until my mother, in her godly wisdom, had diagnosed and cauterized it.

I touch my scar to remind myself that I am not a coward. I am a Quinn.

Satan is not going to leave. The only way to get him out is to invite God in, and God is not welcome in my mother's house.

Anger is airborne. It can be inhaled, and once it enters a body it becomes a tenacious blob of blues and browns with tiny speckles of red. It settles heavy in the lungs, making breathing ever so difficult.

I sat at the table and listened to the women swap stories about the people in our town.They were able to find so much to laugh about; I wondered who was sitting at a table somewhere laughing at us.

I loved her with all my heart, but if she did not die by Monday morning, I was determined to discover from the pages of my schoolbooks, how to break the chains that bound me to my mother.

The best way to get them is through education," Junior countered. "What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred and ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?

I'm a talker, but that doesn't necessarily make a leader.

Our house stood alone on a hill off Penyon Road, about half a mile outside the city limits. It was old, crippled, and diseased - an emblem of poverty and neglect. Nature had tried to cure it by embracing the rear frame with herbs, roots, and a jumble of foliage which spilled over from the surrounding woodland. Nature had failed, and in frustration she sought to destroy the house by eroding the very foundation on which it stood.

Tarabelle was sixteen and almost as tall as Mama. She had long, jet black hair, a copper-colored complexion, and the cold, black eyes of a dead poker player. I had never seen the eyes of a dead person - in fact, I had never seen a poker game - but I had heard that poker faces were expressionless, and I knew that dead people showed no emotion. That was Tarabelle. She stepped back, regarded our mother with those cold black eyes. Her mouth twitched as if she might smile, but I knew better.

In less than five minutes our mother had taught us to never touch her metal box, and the true meaning of fear. I wondered that day if I was the only one in the room who knew that there was something terribly wrong with our mother.

I wondered that day if I was the only one in the room who knew that there was something terribly wrong with our mother.

One of them told me that the United States Constitution gave Chad Lowe the right to bear arms." Junior paused."I asked him if it gave me the same right. He stopped laughing then, told me to try it and see.

This bag is filled with nourishment for the mind and soul. What I have here, Tangy, are promises and hopes, as well as scattered disillusionments. It's like filling your plate with ham, green beans, and potato salad, only to have someone come along and spoon lumpy, dried-out oatmeal on the side. Wouldn't that spoil your appetite?

People passed, spoke and waved with no idea that innocence had sloughed from my body and lay in a heap at my feet.

I know knives and guns are not the answer. Once we get a fight like that started, who will have the power to stop it? How many deaths will be enough?

I expect you to come together as a race," Hambone answered. "I expect you to stop staring at the ground every time you speak to a white man that ain't a drop better than you. I expect you to be the men you were born to be, and to demand your God-given right to be human.