“People who never did a heroic deed themselves are very particular as to how heroes behave...”

“I understand that it would be easier for you to think of him as a hero. But, Valerie, he did kill a lot of kids. Probably not a lot of people are going to think of him as a hero.”

“Once, a great handful of a girl out west told him - I never did love you. […]How mean of her to salve her spit curled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou - they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do - but he stopped himself.”

“So how was it? Did it hurt? Was he gentle? How many times did y’all do it?”

“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.”

“The only people who get better are people who know that, if they never get better, God will love them anyway.”