"I don't know much. She controls the frost, or the frost controls her, or they're the same thing. They say she made a deal with the dark powers, that love would never hurt her again. . . . The devil took her heart and turned it cold. Now she loves however she likes, and when she's tired of them, she wraps them in ice. She keeps them in her palace in the farthest north, they say, all pretty boys like frozen flowers."
​                                                       p. 96 

There were twelve of us: the Thaumas Dozen. Now we stood in a small line, my seven sisters and I, and I couldn't help but wonder if there was a ring of truth to the grim speculations. Had we somehow angered the gods? Had a darkness branded itself on our family, taking us out one by one? Or was it simply a series of terrible and unlucky coincidences?
                                                            p. 4

Khalil drops the brush in the door and cranks up his stereo, blasting an old rap song Daddy has played a million times. I frown. "Why you always listening to that stuff?"

"Man, get outta here! Tupac was the truth."

"Yeah, twenty years ago."
​
"Nah, even now. Like, check this." He points at me, which means he's about to go into one of his Khalil philosophical moments. "'Pac said Thug Life stood for 'The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.'"
                                                          p. 17

The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjustitng to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly. Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair, dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was behavior, the rest of the family--Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove--wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them.
​                                                          p.38

Candy cried, "Sure they all want it. Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus' som'thin' that was his. Somethin' he could live on and there couldn't nobody throw him off of it. I never had none. I planted crops for damn near every'body in this state, but they wasn't my crops, and when I harvested 'em, it wasn't none of my harvest. But we gonna do it now, and don't make no mistake about that. George ain't got the money in town. That money's in the bank. Me an' Lennie an' George. We gonna have a room to ourself. We're gonna have a dog an' rabbits an' chickens. We're gonna have green corn an' maybe a cow or a goat." He stopped, overwhelmed with his picture.

"My beautiful princesses," Dad says when the music pauses and the food stops its endless parade through the hall. "I'm delighted to introduce the  esteemed royals of our neighboring kingdoms to my marvelous girls. Not only are they lovely and kind, we have also seen over the past five years  that they are brave. And strong. Stronger than the rest of us. So strong they are enduring the worst spell our kingdom has ever seen."
                                                  p.65