“It was still dark outside and bitter cold although mercifully there was little wind. Why is it calm in the early morning? You will notice that lakes are usually still and smooth before daybreak.”

“I noticed that the houses in Fort Smith were numbered but it was no city at all compared to Little Rock. I thought then and still think that Fort Smith ought to be in Oklahoma instead of Arkansas...”

“She said, 'Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.' There is your divorced woman talking about decency. I told her, I said, 'Goodbye, Nola, I hope that little nail selling bastard will make you happy this time.”

“If you don't have no schooling you are up against it in this country, sis. That is the way of it. No sir, that man has no chance any more. No matter if he has got sand in his craw, others will push him aside, little thin fellows that have won spelling bees back home.”

“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”

“He drank even as he rode, which looked difficult. I cannot say it slowed him down any, but it did make him silly. Why do people wish to be silly?”