It wasn’t simply his choosing to be alone that kept him that way; it was almost a condition of his existence. The feeling that he was an outsider had always been there.

Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass- he didn't know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere.

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

I'm sort of a misfit everywhere.

A misfit is like the round peg that cannot fit into the square hole or the running river that just can’t stay still.

The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy -- that he looked like a 'wop'. Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in,