I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Lonely was much better than alone.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.