Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers.
The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bo...
The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.
Basil stopped crying instantly in order to enjoy Ciel’s punishment.
All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill.
You’re a crafty old woman. You always try to win an argument by talkin’ about some funeral. You’re too ornery to die, and you know it.
She ain't gotta worry about going on to hell. Hell was right now. Daddy always said that folks misread the Bible. Couldn't be no punishment worse than having to live here on earth, he said.
Like they say, it takes all types to make the world. But sometimes you wish it didn't.
But it's one of the reflections of our times. Young minds today are dulled by television and other visual sensations. When reading was one of the few pleasures available, we could recite whole passage...
They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place.
These young men always moved in a pack, or never without two or three. They needed the others continually near to verify their existence.
She sincerely liked Mattie because unlike the others, Mattie never found the time to do jury duty on other people’s lives.
Power knows power.
Life's too short to spend time trying to explain the obvious to an idiot.
Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want with...
Ceil moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so...
Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs c...
Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hur...
In short, his entire life became a race against the natural—and he was winning.
There is nothing in back of this cafe. Since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility, he back door opens out to a void. It takes courage to turn the k...