“March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence”

“What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”

“I remember wheneach 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlordonly go this rentwhen you hadit, and each day was clear and good and each moment wasfull of promise.”

“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.”

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

“It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.”