[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.

All important things are hard.

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.

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)