What did I do to make Mommy leave?” “You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault.” “Then why?” she’d wailed. “I don’t know,” her daddy had said, and he looked so sad. “It isn’t fair!” “No, it isn’t, baby. Not by a mile. The world’s only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your own little cave, that’s one less fighter on the side of fair.

There in the city's steam-and-smoke-smudged harbor is the most extraordinary sight of all: a great copper-clad lady with a torch in one hand and a book in the other. It is not a statesman or a god or a war hero who welcomes us to this new world. It is but an ordinary woman lighting the way- a lady offering us the liberty to pursue our dreams if we've the courage to begin.

Life don’t come to you, Memphis. You gotta take it. We have to take it. Because ain’t nobody handing it to us.

A place to keep all your secrets

Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we’ve got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead.” “He’s not dead; just very tired.

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

You're quite tall.' Just what a girl wants to be reminded of.