The words settled on her shoulders like a curse, and one thing was clear: there was no one to save her but her.

Where do the homeless make toast?

There ain’t no haints in Detroit.

The same quality that read as dependable and even-keeled in his youth had crusted over and become stubborn and pitiable.

Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of “Ask and you shall receive.” This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha’s prayers were a series of thank-yous and I’m sorrys.

Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do.

You’re worried about her forgiving you... but you need to be worrying about why you’re acting up in the first place.

It was frustrating, the way this siblings worshipped their parents. What part of their worlds would crumble if they took a good look at their parents’ flaws? If there was no trauma, why not talk about the everyday, human elements of their upbringing? Call a spade a spade.

Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least. “I’m.

It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance.