Quotes

1. "There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her -- a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is 'Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson'" (opening lines).
2. “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph"  (opening page).
3. "'If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that's dishonest, It's taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves'" (opening page).
4. "'I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman'" (91).
5. "'Her cells growin big as the world, cover round the whole earth,' he said, his ees tearing as he waved his arm in the air, making a planet around him. 'That's kinda weird . . . They just steady growin and growin, steady fightin off whatever they fightin off'" (161).
6. "Like most researchers he'd never thought about whether the woman behind HeLa cells had given them voluntarily" (180).
7. "When I talked to Howard Jones fifty years after he found the tumor on Henrietta's cervix, he was in his early nineties and had seen thousands of cervical cancer cases. But when I asked if he remembered Henrietta, he laughed. 'I could never forget that tumor,' he said, 'Because it was unlike anything I've ever seen'" (213).
8. "'...When you plant a seed in the ground it does not sprout to life unless it dies. And what you plant is a bare seed... not the full-bodied plant that will later grow up. God provides that seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own proper body'" (295).
9. "In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense. Of course they were growing and surviving decades after her death, of course they floated through the air, and of course, they'd led to cures for diseases and been launched into space. Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so" (296).
10. "After finding Deborah in her bed, Sonny cut a lock of her hair and tucked it inside their mother's Bible with the locks of hair from Henrietta and Elsie. 'She's with them now', [Sonny] told me. 'You know there's no place in the world she'd rather be'" (308).