Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.