Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.

Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.