“But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.”

“In closing, I hope everything helps show that I wouldn’t be a fade-out or a person who turns to think to drink or dope when things get tough. I believe that anything is possible if you have the combination of love for what you’re doing and the will to sit down and not get up until it’s done….”

“You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.”

“You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.”

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. All I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.”

“It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad, they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.”

“You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him.”