Carey

“I just don't know," she sighed allowed, shifted the baby into her arms, and got up to adjust the picture and change channels. She hated it when her two favorite stories came on at the same time; it was a page keep switching channels between Steve's murder trial and Jessica's secret abortion.”
― Gloria Naylor

“The city's children were traumatized enough by the World Trade Center attack. They don't need to see all the panhandlers with seeping sores, the crazies and subway shitters. You hope to keep them segregated and supervised. Not loitering or dwaddling or drifting, because to linger long the path home is to invite bad possibilities. The child snatcher, the pervert, the mob of taunting adolescence wielding box cutters. In Manhattan all monsters are proximate, it's not by geography, then by imagination.”
― Colin Harrison, The Havana Room

“He glided to the podium with the effortlessness of a well-oiled machine and stood still for an interminable long moment. He eyed the congregation confidently. He only needed their attention for that split second because once he got it, he was going to wrap his voice around their souls and squeeze until they screamed to be relieved. They knew it was coming and waited expectantly, breathing in unison as one body. First he played with them and threw out fine silken threads that stroked their heart muscles ever so gently. They trem-bled ecstatically at the touch and invited more. The threads multiplied and entwined themselves solidly around the one pulsating organ they had become and tightened slightly, testing them for a reaction.

The "Amen, brothers" and "Yes, Jesus" were his permission to take that short hop from the heart to the soul and lay all pretense of gentleness aside. Now he would have to push and pound with clenched fists in order to be felt, and he dared not stop the fierce rhythm of his voice until their re-plies had reached that fevered pitch of satisfaction. Yes, Lord grind out the unheated tenements! Merciful Jesus-shove aside the low-paying boss man. Perfect Father-fill me, fill me till there's no room, no room for nothing else, not even that great big world out there that exacts such a strange penalty for my being born black.”
― Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place

“Cora Lee mustn't let the Murphy boy or any other boy show her the thing that felt good in the dark, because her body could now make babies and she wasn't old enough to be a mother. Did she understand? And as she would watch the disjointed mysteries of life connect up in her daughter's mind and hear her breathe out with enchanted wonder--- "A real baby, Mother?"--- the image of that Christmas would come smashing into her brain like a meat cleaver. It was then that she began to worry.”
― Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place