“I myself had no idea who I was. I loved my mother yet looked nothing like her. Neither did I look like the role models in my life—my stepfather, my godparents, other relatives—all of whom were black. And they looked nothing like the other heroes I saw, the guys in the movies, white men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman who beat the bad guys and in the end got the pretty girl—who, incidentally, was always white.”
″ ‘I never let the truth break me before, and I’m not about to start now.’ As awful as it was, as difficult to swallow as it might be, knowing was always better than not knowing.”
“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”
“We were new and beautiful, we loved each other more than brothers, that’s for sure. What spoiled it always was that none of us knew why we were in Albania, none of us had an easy conscience about this rebuilding of the Roman Empire.”
“But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.”
“It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. And so your mama does not know everything. Neither do I. We know only what we need to know.”
“But I need to know more. I need to know what happened to my cousin. Maybe only for the sake of knowing- but maybe because I need to hear that it wasn’t my fault.”
“When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.”
″‘And what you going to do, Richard? What you want to be?’
And his face clouded. ‘I don’t know. I got to find out. Looks like I can’t get my mind straight nohow.‘”
“Charlotte did not like being called standoffish much. But it was so difficult when she was only here every other day. Often she did not know what had happened, what was going on, and she was afraid of showing it, of saying things that might make everyone suspicious.”
“It means the right to have our own opinions. Human problems aren’t like mathematics, Nat. Every problem doesn’t have just one answer; sometimes you get several answers—and you don’t know which is the right one.”
“John said he didn’t want to have to go for walks every day with a girl of twelve who thought she knew everything, and Susan said she didn’t want to have to go for walks with a boy of ten who didn’t know anything at all.”