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I saw five different colors in all—green, blue, yellow, orange, and red.
Dreaming led to disappointment, and disappointment to a kind of depressed funk that wasn’t easy to shake. Better to stay in the gray than get eaten by the dark.
“You shouldn’t—you should never forget. But part of surviving is being able to move on. There’s this word,”
It’s the feeling you get when you realize something you once lost is lost forever, and you can never get it back again.”
“It doesn’t make you a bad person, you know—to want to live your own life.”
“I think maybe the most frustrating feeling in the world is to have something to say but not know how to put it into words. To have lived through something but not be able to get it out of you before it festers.
My mom said once that education was a privilege not afforded to everyone, but she was wrong—it wasn’t a privilege. It was our right. We had the right to a future.
“He’s so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they’re holding in their hand.”
“Try to imagine where we’d be without you, darlin’,” he said, quietly, “and then maybe you’ll see just how lucky we got.”
“Time to carpe the hell out of this diem.”
“Black is the absence of all colors,” Mike said. “We don’t segregate by color here. We all respect one another and our abilities, and we all help one another understand them.
“My dad used to say that anything was possible when you put your mind to it.”
I don’t know when it had dawned on me, or if it had been a slow, creeping realization, but I had begun to understand that black—the color that I had trained myself to fear and hate—was the same thing that allowed these kids to feel a small measure of pride and solidarity.
“I don’t want to lose you.” He made a noise of frustration, his eyes clear and bright as he spoke. “Then why are you the one that keeps letting go?”
The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces.
