Deborah Lacks Quotes

“I don’t want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you...But maybe I’ll come back as some HeLa cells like my mother, that way we can do good together out there in the world.”

“Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.”

“All this stuff I’m learning,′ she said, ‘it make me realize that I did have a mother, and all the tragedy she went through. It hurts but I wanna know more, just like I wanna know about my sister. It make me feel closer to them, but I do miss them. I wish they were here.”

“We all black and white and everything else—this isn’t a race thing. There’s two sides to the story, and that’s what we want to bring out. Nothing about my mother is truth if it’s about wantin to fry the researchers. It’s not about punish the doctors or slander the hospital. I don’t want that.”