No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

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)

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.