“It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.”

“We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.”

“Counterfeits of the past, under new names, may easily be mistaken for the future. The past, that ghostly traveler, is liable to forge his papers. We must be wary of the trap. The past has a face which is superstition, and a mask, which is hypocrisy. We must expose the face and tear off the mask.”

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”

“Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”

“Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”