At Yale, almost everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd grown up in Newark. In Newark, almost everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd gone to Yale.

— Jeff Hobbs

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

— Jeff Hobbs

Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents. In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn't stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would.

— Jeff Hobbs

He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent, but Mr. Carla was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.

— Jeff Hobbs

He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street––especially when he punctuated the hit with the words "Patent that!"... This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution.

— Jeff Hobbs

...he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn't necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they'd begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.

— Jeff Hobbs

In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a freezing, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.

— Jeff Hobbs

Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer." I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.

— Jeff Hobbs

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

— Jeff Hobbs

The student body, too, felt more diverse. Rob often spoke of "real people" with his friends, by which he meant people who struggled, like they all did. On the Ivy League campus visits, any sense of daily or long-term struggle had seemed airbrushed. At Johns Hopkins––and maybe he was only imagining this because of the Ivy League stigma absent in Baltimore––Rob believed the average student had worked harder and sacrificed more to be there.

— Jeff Hobbs