“The man in her dream would ride up and surprise her on his horse…saying her beauty pierced such a great place in his heart.”

“I could wake her up and ask have you ever been to the ocean? but I already know that answer. She has not. You can tell. It would humble you I whisper to her sleeping if you for one time stood by something stronger than yourself.”

“That's all my grandfather was guilty of, fear, faith in his words, but that was a high crime in her eyes. That's all Jack was guilty of that day, but I've lived with him a good while and I believe I understand him. Sometimes it might take an afternoon or evening of being here in this kitchen alone, thinking, but I can usually come to see his reasons through his ways. And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don't you believe it to be so?”

“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.”

“This has been such a glorious afternoon -- my heart would not weep if I did not live to see another.”

“Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can't be laid on society.”

“I am a great believer in variations on the routine.”