“You had to use the back door, and you couldn’t mix in, or you couldn’t drink at the same fountain. And you know, they fought for it as the years went by, but lookin’ back, it didn’t bother me ‘cause I didn’t know any better. You get older, you learn, and realize that wasn’t nice, you know.”

“I had a recollection back to an incident that happened in Norton, when my brother was shot at by a local police officer. So I wrote up the story and I called my brother to say, ‘Was I imagining? Did this really happen?’ And he had forgotten, too.”

“When my grandmother died, my mother was really, really all alone. So she showed up one day, and she rang the doorbell, and I opened the door, and there she was! She had a suitcase and her little portable TV in her hand, and she said, “I’m coming to live with you.”

“Even though we lived in the suburbs, and everything was happy happy, there was still a lot of conflict going on. Both of my parents drank too much, and sometimes there would be money issues, but we couldn’t talk about that because we were all very happy.”

“You can’t sit and lament and cry over things. Honey, I am legally blind. I have to wear hearing aides and everything else. You think I let that bother me? Don’t. Let. Things. Get you down.”

"My dad was such a hard worker. He really wanted the American dream. I think about how it must’ve been for him not really knowing the language, and still trying to navigate through the systems, and not let people take advantage of him."

"I was so beat down, she brought me to the nap room and gave me a bed and literally fed me because I couldn't feed myself. She made me feel good about myself."

"I never swore at them or anything like that. But I gave them a growl. They called me the track star of Timilty School ‘cause I'd chase you down the corridor in a heartbeat."

"I've always been an activist. Even when we were growing up. I had somebody want to beat up my little girlfriend next door and I said, 'Boy, you hit her, you're going to have to hit me, too.'

"I'm a hybrid. I don't wish it on anyone. It's lonely. But I don't know how to be anything else. I feel like that's my calling.”

"His mom came back when I think he was in third grade, and they were moving out of the city, and she's just like: 'I just remember that you cared enough to work with him and nobody else had done that before.'"

“In the public eyes, yeah, everybody says: “They’re a gang” or “They’re a crew.” But I always said it was a family.”

"I like to tell the rednecks that hate blacks and stuff like that: Hey, you want to know something? They checked out DNA to one black guy walking out of Africa 10,000 years ago. And every person on this earth has his DNA marker in it...So we all ARE brothers and sisters. So that’s how we have to look at it."

"Someone opened the door and there were four or five people sitting around the table, all Chinese. And they looked at me in a curious way, you know, 'Who is this person?' And I said, 'I'm here to learn Chinese.'"...

"It’s embarrassing when someone has a fear of you just from the cover of your book. But she doesn’t know. If she had read some of them pages, we would probably have a lot of things similar.”

"When I was back there, before we went on, I could have thrown up at any given moment. You couldn’t grab the script out of my hand, I just kept reading it over and over and over."

"From what my mom has told me, the number one seat, the first seat in a factory, means that you’re the number one seller. And my grandmother sat in that seat. She made clothes for us, just from her scraps and remnant fabric."

“When I started talking to them, and they started talking to me, and they got instantly used to my appearance and everything, and when they saw the artwork I was doing, they were quite surprised.”