One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.
A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.
One can’t be happy as I have been for very long. There’s a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now – look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
I know three things will never be believed – the true, the probable, and the logical.
So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.
For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism – either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.
Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.
I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.
Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.
The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.
He said, “I am a man,” and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.
Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.
It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.
She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.