Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier.

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.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.

Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.