Kekla Magoon Quotes

I have to make peace, somehow, with my place in all of this. Peach Street is still my home; I can't keep thinking of it as a war zone, or a protest platform, or a deathbed. Put one foot in front of the other, go to work. Read the news, sprinkle liberally with salt. Ring up. Make change. Smile. Chitchat.

My moves are smooth. Always have been. I'm smart enough to see what's coming, and clever enough to turn it my way. All my skills make me perfect for this. The street dance. The hustle.

My shoes dangle from my fingertips because, all things considered, barefoot is better.

As a black man, you have to keep your head down. You have to keep yourself steady. You have to follow every rule that's ever been written, plus a few that have always remained unspoken.

I'm really good with problems. I can solve a differential equation in my head. I chew through trig angles like candy. I know this, and it just makes it worse. Because I don't know how to solve this one.

I've never had a guy who's interested in the rest of me. One who likes to look into my eyes. To most guys, I'm just a round face, a double-E cup, and a pair of hippo hips.

It seemed like a backward step at first, but now I know going back was the only way to show how far I've come.

I wish she would just look at me, look at my face and stop talking long enough to see me. To see that things are not right. That none of this is real and I am in some other place.

They spin away, always away. Too fast to understand, sometimes. They rush on, but we remain. They will come back, and we will still be here, as they expect us to be. We are the guardians.
In between each small flurry, we rest. We breathe. Redeema raises her face to the sky. "My children," she murmurs, and the sound of it aches.

It's not that you said it. I care that you even though it.

Like I always tell Will: If you dress like a hood, you will get treated like a hood. If you want to get treated like a man, you have to dress like a man. Simple as that.
It's how this world works.
It stops being about the color of your skin after a while and starts being about how you comport yourself. Inside, too, but mostly out.

I was leaning over him when he died. My hands on his chest. My palms felt his last breath move inside him. His chest rose and fell and then kept falling, like it could carry us both straight down through the earth.
I didn't stop pushing, but I knew. Right then. I was breathing hard myself. My lungs probably took int he last air Tariq ever exhaled. It can't possibly be in me anymore, but it feels like it is. Like it's weighing heavy on my chest with every breath I take, even now.

The river moves, but it follows a path. When it tires of one journey, it rubs through some rock to forge a new way. Hard work, but that's its nature.

If you just play really hard, he says, nothing else matters.