“twenty-five years run around so quickly but thirty one years is a long time.”

“Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?”

“Tillie studied her mother’s face. The face which had seen thirty-seven years of life. Twenty-one years of marriage. The birth of ten babies. The death of one.”

“I'm a woman. Forty-five in female years (which is about a hundred and thirty in male years - bastards).”

“In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!”

“One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.”