- Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany: I'm going blind.
- Sadie Delany: You just spotted a speck of dust on my pants leg from three feet away.
- Amy Hill Hearth: Which would you say is harder, being a woman, or...
- Sadie Delany, Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany: Being colored.
- Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany: Young man, if the phone company gave us a phone for free and sent somebody to stand over that phone and answer that phone for us...
- Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany, Sadie Delany: We still wouldn't want a phone.
- Sadie Delany: You should've run into the woods with those other school teachers.
- Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany: I'd rather die than back down.
- Annie Elizabeth 'Bessie' Delany: [on how they have lived so long] We never had husbands to worry us to death.
- Bessie in her 20s: I've already helped raise my 10 brothers and sisters, I feel like I've raised the whole world, I don't want to have kids.