“Little boys run in gangs, grown men organise teams.”

“A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.”

“Now in those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours and fives, these being like auto-teams, for being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big nightwar, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers.”

“Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.”

“The more I study men, the more I realize that they are nothing in the world but boys grown too big to be spankable.”

“If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick.”