Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. (p306) — Maxine Hong Kingston

They think that Americans are either white or Black. I can't wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare-after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head. I'm the little yellow man beneath the bridge of their hands and overlooked. (p307)

What's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. (p305)

He did too have a philosophy of life: Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people. (p223)