I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.

When you can't go forward, and you can't go backward, and you can't stay where you are without killing off something deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage.