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all I wanted in a person was another iteration of my person, legible to me as I would be to myself.

I felt that I was experiencing the world as only someone who did not exist in it could.

I could make use of him, as normal people made use of other normal people - for love, for sex, for someone to care about your thoughts.

It was lonely being the only one who knew how I was feeling, to not be stored in the mind of someone else who could remind you who you were.

They didn't want the gift-curse of recognition by those they loved and who loved them back, one consequence of that love's durability being that they would be recognized and loved aggressively even on days when they couldn't stand to recognize themselves in the mirror, even on days when merely remembering themselves made them sad and want to sleep.

How is going through a door different if you're a boy? What's in there that merits the strap, just for seeing it?

At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.

It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

People were such fragile things: they existed only from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing.

Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers.

Truth is, lying come natural to all Negroes during slave time, for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thoughts to the boss. Much of colored life was an act, and the Negroes that sawed wood and said nothing lived the longest.

I've been discouraged from having such feelings for so long that I no longer have them.

She was not a woman, but a mere machine for reading and writing.

Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

being a girl involved too much work. I spent my days running around, fetching this or that for these young skinflints, washing their clothes, combing their hair.

Why hadn't they fought harder for him? Why had he ruined it all for himself? Why had they let him? He wanted to devastate them; he wanted them to feel as inhuman as he did.

Oh why must she grow up? Why for pity's sake?