The Great Mann Quotes

“And you? What did you want?” “When I was little?” I look up at the stars again. Five shine brightly, while the others seem to struggle to compete. “I wanted to be white.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“If you do meet with a potential employer today, try to talk like a rich fellow from a novel, perhaps more Dickens than Twain.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“The air is flavored with flowery perfumes and earthy cigars. All around me diamonds glitter from brown earlobes, gold watches flash against brown wrists. The only things white are the walls.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Your husband cooks?” I didn’t even know she was married. “He’s got to, because I’m allergic to kitchens and brooms.” In every single one of her films, Louise Beavers plays a maid.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“If you are born into a marginalized minority group, you come to accept that you will be hated by many of your heroes.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Survival rule #1: Lower your eyes when a white man addresses you.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Everyone has stories. The ones they birth and the ones they bury.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“You don’t have to like your allies, but you do have to support them… …until you don’t.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Ambitious men are so peculiar, aren’t they?” she says, directing her words to the bitter beast. “They never love what they have as much as what they want.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“War…it changes the equation,” James allows. “It’s ugly, it has to be. But this is peacetime.” “There ain’t no peacetime for the American Negro.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Just be sure the dreams you’re chasing are bigger than the nightmares you’re running from.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“I didn’t think my nightmares had the resources to buy their way into a bedroom this grand. I didn’t think I could be dragged back to that night of poverty and danger while in a place of such wealth and security.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“Margie was always the only one in the family who looked at me and saw more than a field hand or a future porter. I’ve missed having someone around who believed dreaming was essential to life.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“He and some of his friends in the West Adams Heights Improvement Association are trying to get the racial covenants in our deeds enforced. Of course, he’ll lose.” A sudden rush of cold shoots through my veins. “The house you’re in wasn’t supposed to be sold to a Negro family?”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann

“It’s possible I drank beyond my capacity last night. Champagne, was it? And one-hundred-year-old cognac. Cognac that was bottled when my granddaddy was in chains, cowering from a whip.”
― Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann