You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp.
If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
I am not one of those women who can stand things.
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.