Henrietta Lacks Quotes

“In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta’s cells makes perfect sense.”

“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.”

“It was a story of white selling black, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important tools in medicine.”

“Everybody say she was real nice and cooked good. […] She liked takin’ care of people […] I mean, people always say she was really just hospitality, you know, fixin everything up nice, make a good place, get up, cook breakfast for everybody, even if it’s twenty of them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Scientists are using technology her cells helped to develop to grow other people’s corneas.” “That’s a miracle,” Sonny said. “I didn’t know about that, but the other day President Clinton said the polio vaccine is one of the most important things that happened in the twentieth century, and her cells involved with that too.” “That’s a miracle,” Lawrence said.”

″[…] I’m glad He sent you,” she said, pointing to the sky. “This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!”

“Hennie made life come alive—bein with her was like being with fun...Hennie just love peoples. She was a person that could make the good things come out of you.”