Shannon Celebi quotes:

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...

Through career fumbles and life changes, she supported me. Through shattered dreams and hopes almost-realized, she supported me too.

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

I think of Ariel, my local neighborhood mermaid, how she only had twenty-four hours to turn her life around...

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

Mrs. Porter was from Virginia and had a smooth-as-cat-fur way of speaking. She taught me how to say, Fiddle-Dee-Dee, just like Scarlett O'Hara and she made her split-pea soup with bacon and even let me try on her lipstick sometimes as she teased up my hair in the same sixties style she wore, Ala Pricilla Presley, whoever that was.

She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

Jeb'd said it was harder for a pretty girl to find work; even white men liked flowers, whether red or pink or blue.

If she could hate this much she sure as hell had loved.

I could say it all began with my mother.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.