In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.
I think he was a gangster.” “Why you say that?” Miss Izi asked. “He had a lot of pockmarks on his face.” “That’s nothing,” Miss Izi said. “That could be from learning to use a fork.
Anytime he said something about the will of God, it meant he weren’t going to cooperate or do nothing but as he saw fit. He had no intentions of leaving Kansas Territory or turning himself in or paying attention to what any white soldier told him. He would tell a fib in a minute to help his cause. He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.
I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir.
Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?
He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.
There was something about him that glistened, something warm that churned and billowed about, like a smoke cloud filled with sparklers.
He leaned on the church wall and gave his heart a moment to catch itself.
Her smile displayed a raw, natural beauty that caught Potts off guard. The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.
Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight.
He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who’ve seen too much and done little about it other than pray.
Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.
She smiled bitterly, and once again the mask she wore so well, the firm lady of strong, impatient indifference whom he’d met when he first walked into the church a week before, broke apart, revealing the vulnerable, lonely soul underneath. She’s just like me, he thought in wonder. She’s as lost as I am.
Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.
Why she got to be bowlegged?” “I do got standards.
A man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.
You’ve got to be strong to get old.
A man ain’t got to stand in church every Sunday to do God’s work.
Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Ya’ll don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties.
Just because you toast marshmallows with a kid on a camping trip doesn’t mean he’ll become a Boy Scout.