Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.
It’s like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.
Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
I don’t like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.
Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be.
He’s crossed all the oceans all around the world.
He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky.
Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
And that wasn’t the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain’t run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.
Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest.
Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.